Regarder au-delà des élections : l’historicité complexe de la participation politique dans la Libye contemporaine

In the aftermath of the Gaddafi regime’s fall, when the NATO-backed National Transitional Council proclaimed the start of the country's transition, in August 2011, a growing concern emerged about the future institutional configuration of Libya and the need to designate new authorities through elections. Since then, many international scholars have considered elections as a yardstick to measure the progress of Libya’s regime change and to determine the (im)possibility of democracy or the inability of Libyan society to establish institutionalised modes of governance. Several critical studies have approached political change in North Africa and the Middle East after 2011 by shifting the focus from institutions and procedural understandings of democratic praxis to society and its structural transformations. The role has been emphasized of popular mobilisations aimed at challenging the decisions of the ruling class, articulating alternative political demands to those articulated by the interim authorities, or rejecting elections as mere tools for the 'staging of democracy' (Benzenine, 2020; Gana and Van Hamme, 2020). However, these perspectives have been rarely applied to the analysis of post-Gaddafi Libya, where the axiomatic acquisition that a positive link exists between elections and democratic transition has obscured the potentialities of engaging into a scholarly debate encompassing all the “politics of becoming” that might be detected by looking even at those mobilisations that escape and often contest the electoral dynamic. The choice of individuating elections as the top priority of post-Gaddafi Libya and the means to end rivalries between interim authorities, in fact, has never been critically interrogated. In these readings, abstentionism or the practice of delegitimising the elected authorities has been attributed to the lack of democratic political culture and knowledge of institutional instruments on the part of Libyan citizens, both individually and collectively, after some 42 years of dictatorship. Our contribution argues that it is necessary to move away from these normative conceptions of politics in general in order to formulate different readings on and discuss alternative forms of deliberative governance. We propose to reverse the transitological perspective that focuses on the absence, postponement, or ineffectiveness of Libyan elections as an obstacle to the emergence of a democratic state. We argue it is the lack of effective channels to promote a truly inclusive debate on post-revolutionary Libya that hinders the possibility of completing the process of revolutionizing an oppressive, exclusionary, and corrupt power system initiated by the 17 February 2011 uprising. To shed light on the current political scenario, we propose here to reconsider the political from below, and namely by looking where only disruptions to the neo-liberal model of functioning democracies have been detected so far - and thus in most manifestations referred to as 'chaos', 'statelessness' or absence of 'political culture'. In order to adopt an approach that focuses on the strategies and practices of renegotiating politics experimented by Libyan citizens, and thus reasoning in terms of the politics of becoming rather than the politics of transition (Dakhlia, 2016), this analysis has required reconsidering the historical experiences of political experimentation and social mobilisation that have characterised the country over the long term as useful precedents to better understand current forms of political engagement at the individual and collective levels. We, therefore, draw on the historiography of modern Libya so as to approach the debate on the multifaceted practices of political participation, legitimation and deliberation in the country from a diachronic perspective and moving beyond the neoliberal model of democracy. The challenge is to interrogate why Libya's interim representative bodies did not simply collapse in the aftermath of the first elections in July 2012 but, instead, swarmed into rival centres of power as well as, in some cases, shadow institutions, while giving rise to more effective local bodies at the sub-national level. The historical perspective shows, in fact, that these strategies of conflictual mobilisation do not reflect a refusal of democratic procedures, but rather the partiality of the representation procedures of so-called transitional authorities. The current forms of individual and collective mobilisation, which are alternative and even opposed to electoral democracy, may be considered as other modes of popular participation in the process of articulating radically new imaginaries for the many possible presents that are currently in-the-making in post-Gaddafi Libya’s. Hence, they do not represent the mere resurgence of conflicts allegedly inherent to Libyan society labelled according to certain orientalist expressions as "traditional", incapable of any form of political organisation capacity, characterised by "anarchy", "disorder" or "political immaturity". Rather, they reflect the strategic rejection by some citizens, associations, and organisations of interim representatives perceived as incapable of providing meaningful forms of political representation. These claims are ways of practising democracy by addressing the issue of representation 'otherwise', which also echoes other phases of the country's history. Haut de page