El Taraboulsi-McCarthy, Sherine. 2023. A State of Discord: A Sociohistorical Reflection on Contested Statehood in Libya. In Armando Salvatore, Sari Hanafi & Kieko Obuse (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Abstract: Contrary to the majority of Western scholarship on Libya, which ascribes Libya’s “statelessness” to a failure on the part of local actors to adopt modern state formation following independence in 1951, the author argues that this view fails to take into account local power dynamics among social actors and between social actors and the state (colonial and postcolonial) that manifested themselves in modes of cooperation and contestation and have shaped Libya’s experience with statehood. The author shows that while contestation among social actors before and after independence had been stronger than centralizing forces, resulting in a state of discord, this should be explained in context and through a local account of Libya’s history as a colonized country. This chapter calls for a more robust incorporation of temporal aspects of social and political development in theorizing the state in Libya and the Arab world.