Rival Libyan state institutions

Libya retained a state-shaped economy without a settled state

The fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 removed a ruler who had deliberately kept formal institutions weak and authority personal. It did not reveal a ready constitutional order underneath. Revolutionary brigades retained weapons and local legitimacy; elected bodies claimed national mandates; municipalities, tribal and city networks, courts, ministries, and military formations each held pieces of practical authority. Libya therefore did not simply move from one government to two. It acquired a crowded field of offices that could issue instructions, pay constituents, block rivals, or supply force, with no accepted procedure for deciding whose instruction prevailed.¹²

That condition differs from constitutional pluralism. A federation or a power-sharing settlement states which level may decide what and gives affected people a forum for challenging the boundary. Libya's post-2014 arrangement often gave several actors a veto without giving any of them final responsibility. The resulting flexibility sometimes prevented total collapse. It also let a ministry blame a militia, a militia invoke a government, and each government describe the other as illegitimate while civilians lived under decisions made by all of them.³

A disputed transition turned offices into rival claims

The decisive institutional break came in 2014. Disputes around parliamentary elections and the constitutional transition combined with armed conflict to produce a House of Representatives and allied authorities in the east and a rival political-military order in Tripoli. The 2015 Libyan Political Agreement, negotiated under United Nations auspices, created a Government of National Accord, but it never consolidated acceptance across the main armed and institutional centers. Formal design could name a presidency council; it could not make commanders, legislators, courts, or foreign sponsors treat its rulings as final.⁴¹

The 2020 ceasefire and 2021 formation of the Government of National Unity created another bridge. Its stated destination was national elections in December 2021. When those elections were postponed, the temporary bridge became another contested incumbent, and the eastern House designated a Government of National Stability. United Nations reporting in 2024 continued to identify unresolved electoral rules, rival political centers, and parallel or weakly coordinated security structures.¹⁵

Foreign support hardened the domestic split. Turkey backed the Tripoli-based order; Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and others supported eastern forces at different times. External money, weapons, and diplomatic recognition gave local actors alternatives to compromise. A losing coalition did not necessarily have to accept a national bargain if a patron could keep its payroll and coercive capacity alive.¹⁵

Economic institutions became both commons and prizes

Oil made complete separation impractical. Most export revenue enters through the National Oil Corporation and the Central Bank of Libya, while public wages and subsidies sustain households across political lines. Rival authorities could interrupt production or contest spending, but neither could readily build a separate national economy. This created an unusual institutional substrate: the country could lack one accepted executive while still paying many employees from one resource stream.⁶

That thin unity was valuable. It kept teachers, clinicians, municipal workers, and families connected to a national fiscal system. It was also a prize. Armed groups could blockade oil, press for appointments, or use access to letters of credit and public payrolls as patronage. The IMF describes armed formations in western cities as nominally incorporated into state structures and paid by the state while remaining outside effective legal command. Public finance thus supported both ordinary life and organizations capable of vetoing public authority.⁶²

The central bank's announced reunification in 2023 showed that functional repair can precede a comprehensive political settlement.⁷⁶ United Nations reporting also treats coordination among the bank, the oil corporation, and oversight bodies as essential to transparent national expenditure.⁵ Yet reunifying an organigram does not by itself make budgets contestable by the public or disarm the actors able to threaten its officers.

Derna exposed the difference between many authorities and accountable care

Storm Daniel struck eastern Libya in September 2023. Two dams above Derna failed, sending water through the city and killing or leaving missing thousands of people. The disaster had a natural trigger, but the scale of death reflected dam neglect, unsafe construction in the flood path, restricted civic space, and fragmented responsibility. Long-known maintenance concerns had not produced effective repair. After the flood, families searched hospitals, morgues, the coast, and official lists while authorities controlled information and access.⁸⁹

Libyans also acted across the political divide. Volunteers, rescue workers, and donations came from western cities as well as the east, demonstrating a national solidarity more coherent than the executive order.¹⁰ That civic response demonstrated national solidarity but did not supply institutional accountability. Analysts of the flood connect delayed maintenance and the response directly to the country's divided governing system and politicized reconstruction.⁹ An authority may mobilize excavators and still prevent an independent account of who ignored the dams.

The same gap is sharpest for people with the least political protection. Migrants and refugees passing through Libya can be detained, extorted, or moved among facilities associated with nominal state bodies and armed groups. A detainee encounters concentrated authority at the gate but fragmented responsibility when seeking release, wages, family contact, or justice. Rivalry therefore does not always weaken coercion. It can make coercion easier to deny.²

Durable pluralism would require bounded authority, not merely shared posts

Repeated negotiations have often concentrated on who receives which office. That can halt fighting, but it also rewards actors for preserving a credible threat. A more durable settlement would have to connect authority to a public budget, a defined jurisdiction, civilian control, and review that a rival cannot erase by force. It would also need municipalities and citizens to participate as more than constituencies delivered by armed intermediaries.⁴⁵³

Libya's partial successes clarify the opportunity. National oil accounting, central-bank coordination, local service provision, elections that people can trust, and cross-regional disaster response are not dependent on perfect political unity. They can become scaffolding for it. But the measure of progress is not the number of factions represented at the center. It is whether a family in Derna, a public engineer, a migrant in detention, or a municipality awaiting funds can identify who had authority, see the evidence behind the decision, and obtain a remedy without first acquiring an armed patron.⁶²⁸

Functional reunion must become answerable authority

Reuniting the central bank and preserving a national oil-and-payroll system show that institutional repair does not have to wait for perfect political unity. Those common functions can also remain prizes through which rival coalitions finance themselves. The difference is public review: one account for oil receipts and spending, civilian command over forces paid from that account, municipal access by rule rather than patron, and courts able to reach every center. Derna made the stakes concrete. Volunteers crossed the political divide more readily than responsibility did; families encountered many officials and no dependable route to an independent account of dam neglect and death. Libya will have moved from fragmentation toward plural government when a public engineer can warn, a detainee can challenge confinement, and a municipality can obtain funds without an armed sponsor—because each office's authority and duty are bounded and visible, not because every faction has acquired another seat at the center.³

Lebanon's confessional system shows a different form of plural veto: constitutionally allocated communal offices rather than Libya's overlapping executives and armed patrons. Both can diffuse responsibility; Libya adds the ability of actors to redraw jurisdiction by force. Durable pluralism requires not merely representation but a settled answer about who must remedy each decision.³

Relations to other institutions and ideas

Lebanon's confessional power-sharing system is a comparison in plural veto. Lebanon assigns offices through a constitutional communal settlement; Libya's executives, legislatures, security formations, and patrons frequently overlap without a settled jurisdiction. Both can diffuse responsibility, but armed actors in Libya can redraw the practical boundary by force.³

Somaliland's peace conferences provide a contrast in institutional assembly. Repeated local and inter-clan bargaining there built a more legible political settlement from negotiated obligations; Libya's repeated national bargains have remained vulnerable to parallel coercive and fiscal centers that were not bound by the new organigram.³

Eskom under state capture is a comparison in how control of a national economic institution can finance and protect political networks. Libya differs because several rival centers compete for oil, banking, appointments, and budgets rather than one network capturing a unified public utility.³

Authority, legitimacy, and acceptance, governance, stewardship, and accountability, and coordination, communication, and common understanding are defining editorial relations. They separate the ability to issue or enforce an instruction, the duty to answer for its consequences, and the agreements that make boundaries among institutions understandable.³

Concept fingerprint

Purpose, mission, and institutional legitimacy has supporting weight. Rival institutions invoke revolution, sovereignty, security, representation, elections, national unity, public service, and stability. The 2015 agreement made those purposes explicit, while later division shows that shared language did not settle authorization or compliance. ⁴⁵

Authority, legitimacy, and acceptance is defining. Elections, legal instruments, international recognition, local acceptance, public payrolls, armed control, and foreign backing supplied different claims to rule. No single claim reliably displaced all the others. ¹²

Delegation, decentralization, and responsibility has supporting weight. Municipalities, ministries, branches, commanders, and local intermediaries exercised real discretion, but delegation often lacked a superior authority able to define scope, review performance, or impose a remedy across the divide.⁵⁹

Coordination, communication, and common understanding is defining. Oil revenue, central banking, payrolls, ceasefire bodies, dialogue, municipal services, and flood relief all required cooperation among actors that disputed one another's legitimacy. The bank and disaster response show that bounded functional coordination is possible without complete political unity. ⁶⁷¹⁰

Structure, hierarchy, and scale has supporting weight. Libya had executives, legislatures, ministries, courts, municipalities, economic institutions, armed formations, and international processes, but their formal hierarchy diverged from territorial and coercive control.⁴¹

Decision-making, judgment, and bounded rationality has supporting weight. Officials and communities acted under uncertain security, law, revenue, warning, and patron behavior; rivals could interpret compromise as loss of future leverage. The record does not imply that every delay or failure was an information problem rather than capture, coercion, or choice. ⁵⁹

Measurement, accounting, and control is defining. Oil receipts, budgets, salaries, foreign exchange, bank balances, price indices, detention counts, damage estimates, and missing-person lists were both instruments of coordination and sites of dispute. The IMF itself identifies severe data and geographic-coverage gaps, so an official figure cannot stand in for public control.⁶⁵⁸

Cooperation, incentives, and organizational equilibrium is defining. Shared oil revenue and public salaries discouraged complete separation, while offices, budgets, coercive autonomy, and foreign patrons rewarded actors for preserving veto power. Temporary cooperation could therefore coexist with a durable fragmented equilibrium.⁶¹

The zero score for work design, productivity, and automation is retained. Public, oil, banking, security, rescue, and municipal work plainly continued, but the selected evidence does not explain fragmentation through job design, productivity systems, or automation.³

Knowledge, expertise, and professional autonomy has limited weight. Bankers, engineers, clinicians, investigators, auditors, municipal staff, and election administrators held specialist knowledge, yet armed and political vetoes could override or silence it. Direct evidence from professionals about those encounters remains thin.⁶⁸²

Learning, quality, and reliability has limited weight. The ceasefire, bank reunification, audits, local mediation, and post-flood assessment supplied opportunities to learn, but repeated institutional division and the dam disaster do not establish a reliable system for converting warning or review into preventive correction.⁵⁷⁹

Strategy, competition, and adaptation has supporting weight. Rival leaders and armed formations competed for territory, recognition, posts, revenue, and foreign support while adapting alliances and using blockades, budgets, appointments, and negotiations as leverage. ¹⁵

The zero score for innovation, entrepreneurship, and renewal is retained. Functional reunion and local cooperation can renew institutions, but the record does not make novelty or entrepreneurship a principal mechanism; many arrangements reproduce older patronage and coercive capacity. ⁶³

Governance, stewardship, and accountability is defining. The case turns on who may spend, appoint, detain, command, maintain, warn, investigate, and reconstruct—and whether anyone can compel an answer. The political agreement states public-law principles that the fact-finding and flood records show were not reliably realized.⁴²⁹

Culture, informal organization, trust, and voice has supporting weight. City, regional, family, tribal, revolutionary, military, and patron networks shaped loyalty and mediation outside formal charts, while volunteers crossed the east-west line after the flood. Informal solidarity can preserve life without making rulers answerable.¹⁰⁵

Executive attention, information, and organizational sensing is defining. Rival prime ministers, legislative leaders, commanders, bank governors, international envoys, and senior patrons could redirect budgets, security, oil, and negotiation. Derna also shows the danger when warnings and maintenance needs do not produce sustained executive attention across divided offices.⁵⁹

The zero score for organizational ignorance is retained conservatively. The record identifies data gaps, access restrictions, suppressed civic space, and unimplemented warnings, but it does not yet trace a single stable process by which the rival institutional field collectively produced and defended ignorance across cases.⁶²³

Evidence still needed

• Trace one national dinar of oil revenue from production and sale through the National Oil Corporation, central bank, budget authorization, ministry or parallel spending channel, payroll or contract, delivery, audit, and remedy.
• Publish interoperable national and subnational data for budgets, arrears, salaries, subsidies, procurement, bank payments, oil interruptions, service access, prices, and infrastructure condition with geographic and institutional provenance.
• Map every armed formation paid, appointed, affiliated, or tolerated by a public authority, including command, detention sites, funding, weapons, territorial control, complaints, discipline, and changes in allegiance.
• Follow warnings about the Derna dams from engineering observation through budget, procurement, access, maintenance, emergency planning, evacuation, investigation, compensation, and reconstruction, including records controlled by residents and bereaved families.
• Compare the authority and working conditions of engineers, auditors, judges, clinicians, teachers, bank staff, municipal workers, rescuers, journalists, and investigators across eastern, western, and southern institutions.
• Center evidence from women, youth, Tebu and other marginalized communities, detainees, migrants, refugees, disabled people, displaced people, families of the missing, nonparticipants, and communities outside major coastal cities.
• Audit foreign military, financial, diplomatic, commercial, and reconstruction support by patron, recipient, condition, end use, public authorization, and effect on incentives to reach a domestic settlement.
• Establish ecological and nonhuman baselines for oil operations, conflict, unexploded ordnance, water systems, floods, debris, waste, coastal impacts, habitat, livestock, and reconstruction.
• Test each ceasefire, dialogue, bank, budget, election, and institutional-unity announcement against dated implementation milestones, dissenting parties, reversals, and an accessible remedy for affected people.