A systems analysis reveals a transnational ‘continuum of violence’ connecting Edo State to Libya’s conflict economy.
Libya has been beset by violent conflict since 2011 when popular uprisings sparked a civil war and led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Since 2011, two further major bouts of violent conflict occurred, in 2014 and 2019, while sporadic fighting and insecurity have become a defining feature of the post-Gaddafi landscape.
These events in Libya have been closely connected to developments occurring outside the country’s borders, including in Chad, Italy, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan. For this reason, this research paper focuses on the transnational dynamics that have fuelled conflict in Libya. In particular, the paper contends that the feminist approach of the ‘continuum of violence’ provides a productive lens through which to observe and understand the interactions between different forms of violence and conflict across borders.
Continuums of violence can be understood as connecting the ‘violence of everyday life, through the structural violence of economic systems that sustain inequalities and the repressive policing of dictatorial regimes, to the armed conflict of open warfare’ across borders. Such an approach shows the connections between eruptions of conflict and instances of violence, often happening across vast geographies, and demonstrates how causes and impacts of conflict are transnational.
To implement this approach, this paper produces a qualitative systems analysis to illustrate how the political, economic and security processes that underpin the movement of people produce a continuum of violence that connects Edo State to the Libyan conflict.
The systems analysis is used to show the connectivity between different types and extents of violence across extensive transnational geographies which together make up the continuum of violence. In particular, it will focus on how violence can cascade across borders to (re)produce violent conflict in Libya.
A systems analysis operates from the premise that conflict is best understood as a social system that contains adaptive structures and evolutionary mechanisms. These processes, identified by the qualitative systems analysis, are part of a vast web of social dynamics. For the purposes of this paper, the processes have been simplified as much as possible to allow for an analysis of areas where policy or programmatic interventions may be particularly effective. This analysis focuses on two types of connecting loops: causal loops which identify causal relationships between the key social, political, security and economic factors that shape the interaction between the movement of people and violence; and feedback cycles which show the interplay between the causal loops.
The paper’s approach to analysing conflict settings builds on Ulrike Krause’s work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Krause identified connections between different experiences of violence, showing how gender-based and sexual violence experienced by both men and women, and carried out by armed groups, was tied to domestic violence in Ugandan refugee settlements.
