 Good morning. My name is Mona Yacubian. I'm the Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa here at USIP. It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you, both those of you here in the room, as well as our online audience, to today's discussion, which is entitled, A Monopoly on the Use of Force in Libya. We will be examining disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, or DDR, efforts in Libya. Let me say a quick word about USIP. USIP was founded in 1984 by Congress and works to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict around the world. We do this by engaging directly in conflict zones, including in Libya, and by providing analysis, education, and resources to those working for peace. I'd also like to say a word about our work in Libya. We've been engaged on Libya since 2012, committed to supporting international efforts for advancing peace in Libya. Starting in 2018, our increased field presence has enabled us to engage directly with Libyan actors from facilitating in-depth dialogues in the Fizan in southern Libya, which have been instrumental in addressing local needs and fostering grassroots reconciliation to our extensive collaboration with national institutions, including the Presidential Council. Our efforts have been deeply focused on fostering inclusive reconciliation. Recognizing the crucial role of DDR in advancing peace and security, USIP remains dedicated to furthering progress on DDR efforts in Libya's security sector. Effective DDR is not just a security measure. It's a cornerstone for advancing peace and economic stability essential for the peace process. As part of our commitment to the US government's efforts in supporting DDR in Libya, we're actively partnering with the State Department's Bureau of Conflict Stabilization Operations. This partnership focuses on supporting Libyan civilian institutions in the development of a national DDR strategy. Today's discussion is one of the many fruits of our partnership in collaboration. Let me briefly introduce our speakers in the order in which they'll speak. First, I'm very pleased to welcome Gail Morgato, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Conflict and Stabilization Operation Bureau at the State Department. She leads the Bureau's efforts to anticipate, prevent, and respond to conflict and instability in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. She will be followed by Tim Eaton, a senior research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. He's the author of the paper launched today on how local forces shape Libya's security sector. His research focuses on the political economy of conflict in the MENA region with a particular focus on the Libyan conflict. We also welcome Andrew Cheetham, who will moderate our discussion with Tim, who is our colleague, a senior advisor here at USIP. He is a lawyer and former United Nations official who's implemented programs in highly complex conflict and crises environments in the Middle East and Africa, including in Libya. With that, I'd like to hand the floor over to Das Morgato. Das Morgato, the floor is yours. Welcome. Thank you so much, Mona, the United States Institute for Peace, for organizing today's event, and to Tim Eaton for sharing insights from his research with us today. Understanding Libya's armed groups and identifying entry points for future disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration are essential for supporting long-term stability in Libya. The Bipartisan Global Fragility Act of 2019 and the subsequent strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability set forth an innovative long-term approach to addressing conflict, violence, and instability globally. In coordination with the National Security Council, the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operation leads an interagency process in partnership with the State Department's regional bureaus and missions, USAID, DOD, and Treasury, to implement the strategy in four countries and one region. These are Libya, Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Mozambique, and Costa West Africa. Both the Global Fragility Act and the strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability recognize that America's prosperity and national security depend on peaceful, self-reliant, and stable economic and security partners. Libya's inclusion as a GFA priority country demonstrates that we are invested in supporting long-term stability in Libya. The Libya 10-year plan focuses on national reconciliation and an elected government we can partner with that ensures human rights, delivers services, promotes economic growth, and secures its borders. We are pursuing flexible, adaptable approach focused on community-level programs that can be scaled up as opportunities arise to support national elections, access to security, justice, accountability, establishing pathways to reconciliation and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Regarding this last point on DDR, we are particularly excited to learn more from Tim Eaton about the opportunities and the potential community-level entry points for future DDR. And he's identified through his research. Thank you for the invitation. And I look forward to today's discussion, without further ado, to our speakers. Tim, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to Amuna and Desmogada for the kind introduction and for USIP kindly hosting me here today. I'm delighted to present some of the findings of Chatham House Research, which has been running over the last two years, looking at the development of armed actors in Mizrata, Zhaoya, and Zintan since 2011. And I've got some slides, not too many, but I want to take you through kind of some of the top-level findings and why we're looking at these issue sets and then hopefully that will open the door for what that might mean for issues related to DDR. So in terms of the project, why have we worked on this? Well, Chatham House has been working for quite some time to try and understand how armed factions have developed in Libya. There's been a heavy interest, particularly in the forces of Haftar, the LAF. We've written about that in the past. There's also been a lot of discussion, of course, about what happens in the capital, Tripoli. But I had a sense that, for the most part, these discussions focused either on Tripoli or Benghazi, and there are a lot of other areas of Libya and its vast security sector, which weren't really being covered. And it was our conviction that, actually, there are some quite big differences here. And so we selected Mizrata, Zhaoya, and Zintan three cities that have come to play a major role in Libya's security landscape since 2011 in different ways. And what we've tried to do through a large number of interviews, discussions with officials close to the security sector, outreach, and interviews with community members, is understand how those security sectors have evolved since 2011. We've mapped over 400 key individuals, institutions, and armed groups across those three cities. And we've tried to get a sense of who they really are. Now, there's a lot of debate, of course, about the nature of Libyan armed groups. And often it's become a bit of a policy trope that armed groups are the source of the problem, and that if you could just move the armed groups aside in their vested interests, that perhaps progress in other areas would be much more straightforward. But I think that what you find through this analysis is that things aren't quite so simple. And of course, particularly given the nature of the networks in these cities and their proximity to the populations, actually, I think the key finding is that these security sectors reflect those city dynamics primarily and map onto the state rather than the other way round. So you can see through these images that these are the networks that we've been following, trying to understand how they've evolved, and some key conclusions. The first one, which I've hinted towards, is that actually whilst you can do endless analysis of the affiliations of certain armed groups, the creation of new groups, new names, many of these groups like to change their names quite regularly or create new forces, often with names that are difficult to remember. But focusing on key social constituencies and commanders rather than those trends, I think shows you the continuity and the real power dynamics that lie underneath these local security sectors. And that security sector reflects local conditions. And still, whilst this is true to differing degrees, as I'll note, they remain based at their core on social networks that aren't completely distinct from the broader local situation. And as a result, the state affiliations that we see have in most cases proven weak and subject to change. If you follow, and we have all of these groups through their various institutional voyages since 2011, you'll find that many of them have obtained state affiliation through all kinds of different state institutions from the Ministry of Defense and Interior to the Presidency Council, the Libyan Intelligence Service. And ultimately, though, those affiliations don't necessarily reflect exactly what those armed groups do, there's a very stark difference between what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to be connected to the state to how they actually act. And this is part of a broader debate where we might talk about hybridity, where armed groups are affiliated to the state but not subject to its authority. But I think a good framing point here and what we're trying to get across is that, whilst SSR is supposed to then happen by the state subsuming the armed groups under its structures, actually, what you've tended to find is that the armed groups have subsumed the state. So it's happening in reverse, and that has pretty major implications when you want to think through issues relating to DDR. So I'll just walk you through some of the overall findings from the three cities. They're each very complex in their own right and I could talk about them at some length. And of course, if you'll have specific questions about them, be more than happy to talk. My editors at Chatham House tend to get quite frustrated. The 55-page was the short version, in my view, but there is a lot of detail to cover here. Overall, though, I think starting off with the city of Nisrata, which has kind of become seen as a bulwark of the revolution since 2011, it's got some really interesting dynamics which distinguish it as a... and distinguish its local security apparatus. And particularly the relationship between the community and the groups is very interesting. We find, and some may contest this, but certainly from the testimony of Nisrata themselves, that support for the goals of the revolution, certainly rather than formal state authority, remains at the centre of the social contract between the community and its armed groups. And that's really important, of course. The majority of Nisrata's that have fought since 2011 also don't belong to the military and don't necessarily have a sense of hierarchy and command. And in this sense, you've kind of got a duality of the Nisrata security sector. When the city is not engaged in a major conflict, the preponderance of its armed men are demobilised, and they are basically remaining in the city. And the state-affiliated elements of the Nisrata security apparatus issue orders and they're followed, but when it comes to war and the city mobilising, then it kind of transforms into a much wider social mobilisation that requires everybody's buy-in and is not following the orders of the state or even necessarily just some key commanders. There's a dialogue in that. Nisrata's security sector has been the focus of some reform efforts locally, internationally. And in some sense, we found that there was a success in installing a military hierarchy and training new recruits. But actually, when you look beneath them and there's a table in the paper which shows you that many even of the new armed factions have their origins in revolutionary groups. And actually, the influence of those groups remains on those revolutionary origins and those connections, and that's really important to remember. The clear examples of this are brigades 166, 301, the Joint Operations Force and the CTF, each of them having their origins in revolutionary factions. We found that within the city, the Ministry of Interior Affiliated Forces had really kind of consolidated their authority since 2015 via the Nisrata security directorate and that that directorate continues to seek support both from that Joint Operations Force and a special support force to act within the city. And this was effectively something that there was consensus on and a lot of support for. Yet, whilst the other elements of the security sector, the more formal elements, of course, a key commander from Nisrata, from the formerly of the Halbus Brigade is the Chief of the General Staff and his efforts to expand the armed forces under the formal aegis of the military, of the central military zone, whilst those groups have expanded, still, we don't see them as being influential and we don't see them as able to access resources and funds and act particularly when it matters. At the same time, this dual face of the security sector remains and actually some of the most prominent revolutionary factions within Nisrata remain completely unconnected formally to the state's institutions. Those key commanders in this social mobilization remains a key part of the story within the city. Moving to Zawia, quite a different story to tell here. I mean, basically, Zawia has become increasingly significant in Libya's security landscape and in political negotiations, particularly since 2019. Its strategic position on the outskirts of Tripoli has led rival national factions to seek to obtain support from them and to be able to then utilize that position to wield influence and control over the capital. But actually what you see from the Zawian example is quite different to the Mizratan one, where the many Mizratan groups since 2011 have remained based on core social constituencies and some have partly formalized, others remain subject to social mobilizations. I mentioned really in Zawia what you've got is straight-out competition, zero-sum battles over key strategic interests and a lot of it related to the illicit sector. Two main axes of power have emerged in the city based on familial ties and from neighborhood locations, which has also dictated the means through which the Zawian security sector has obtained affiliation with the Libyan state. So these groups, most of them didn't play a significant role in 2011 fighting, have utilized their position and control of the illicit sector to expand into what almost seemed like kind of conglomerates and then use that influence to leverage with the state to obtain formal recognition. And of the two factions that we see, two axes, as I would call them, got the central Zawia axes, axes of Mahmoud bin Rajab and Mohammed Bahroon being two key commanders, and they bring largely factions together from the Aladzaka tribe and family-based groupings located in the center of the city. While a second antagonistic axis has been built on Aboufmyra tribe under the leadership of armed groups headed by the Abu Zareba and Kushlaf families, two sets of three brothers, which control southern Zawia and the refinery, although this is becoming increasingly under pressure in recent weeks and months. As I noted, those two axes have largely been formed through competition over control of economic interest, mostly in the illicit sector, and those actors have effectively dictated the terms on which they've engaged with the state. The politicians have sought to reward Zawia's armed groups for their loyalty with resources and legitimacy, particularly in recent years, and this has led to them being increasingly integrated into the state structure. However, there hasn't really been much that's come with this in terms of efforts to professionalize local forces or break their existing chains of command. Those local forces have been able to dictate. One key development was when Aboufmyra axis was formalized in the Stability Support apparatus, while the Central Zarya axis has been formalized through the Ministry of Defence's West Coast military zone. These two axes have backed different candidates in the last couple of years, with the SSA basically falling and seeking to support Fatiba Shuga's government, and, of course, one of the Buzariba brothers being a minister of interior of that government, whilst the opposing axis has supported the incumbent Beiber government. We've seen over the last year, mostly the six, nine months, that there's been quite a lot of fighting in and around Zarya as those proxy battles continue to play out following Basharga's fall. Moving to Zintan, again, you kind of get a slightly different set of dynamics and a very complicated set of dynamics, where Zintan kind of played this very outsized role immediately after 2011 in occupying key areas of the capital. But really, since 2014, Zintan's security sector has fractured significantly, and there have been parallel processes of integration with eastern and western-based authorities, and it really is quite a jumble trying to follow how these groups have moved through their formal affiliations. But if you do extract from the minutiae of those dynamics, you can see that it's key Zintani commanders that are leading the negotiation between Zintani armed groups and the state. And these I'll talk about shortly. In a way, you can talk about Zintan's armed groups being based on four factions, some are pro-government and national unity, some have been pro-Libyan Arab armed forces of Haftar, some are pro-Gaddafi, and others even position themselves as neutral. However, there's quite a lot of overlap between them, and as I noted, I think judging these groups based on those affiliations is a very weak, is a limiting way of understanding them. Some groups have taken pro-LAF and pro-Gaddafi positions simultaneously, which you might think is somewhat contradictory. And while others have technically remained part of the GNU, even though they don't recognize it. So I think this kind of speaks to the complexity of Libya's local features. But in terms of the key commanders who have kind of led the charge, really Osama Jweli is the main name since 2011, who's been omnipresent, but also Immanuel Tbilisi, they've both acted as focal points for the pursuit of Zintani interests through state authorities in the capital. This was particularly notable when Jweli was Minister of Defence, and of course, Tbilisi is currently Minister of Interior of the GNU, which is a way of the GNU keeping the Zintanis enough on site. Zintan's relations with Haftar and the LAF must be seen in the context of the developments in Tripoli, as part of the outbreak of the 2014 war, as elements of the Zintan Military Council broke off to join the LAF. And in this sense, the narrative of the Zintanis of the 2014 conflict is one of betrayal that they were stabbed in the back by other groups, notably those from Mizrata, whereas the Mizrata narrative is that they saved the revolution and prevented counter-revolution by entering. These narratives are super important. Haftar used links with religious and tribal leaders in Zintan to kind of bolster these connections, particularly with the elements of the Zintani armed groups that affiliated themselves with the Eastern authorities. For them, these were the legitimate authorities, and they followed that authority. But by 2016, under Jweli, there had been a reconciliation under the Government of National Accord. However, despite all of these different dynamics and fighting on different sides, particularly in 2019, where you actually have Zintani armed groups fighting on different fronts, on different sides of the conflict, they never came into direct conflict, and that wasn't an accident. That was very heavily... there was a big social effort to ensure that that didn't take place. And just finishing off on the Zintan point, in that sense, though, really, there is a slight opportunity at the moment because after all of these different affiliations and after the ostracization of Jweli from the GNU, actually, the majority of Zintani armed groups are now announcing that they are willing to work together. But basically, it's the Minister of Interior, Trabelsi, who is keeping the GNU connected to dynamics in Zintan. But Zintan therefore now presents quite a looming threat for the GNU's forces. So, I probably spoke already for too long about those aspects, but you can see that they're complicated and there's much that we can delve into. When looking at the community's perceptions of armed groups, this is something which is quite difficult to obtain. We worked really hard to speak with as many members of the communities as we could with a good cross-section. But there were some really strong takeaways that despite all of the criticisms of the armed groups about many exist, there was a near consensus in all of the cities that they needed their own armed forces to protect the city, otherwise they would basically be subject to domination and devastating consequences. And so, those armed groups are still seen to play an important, if imperfect role in protecting their respective cities. And that's something that's kind of been a bit pushed aside by a lot of the international discussions around these groups who are seen as overly self-interested. But there's a real difference. In Mizrata, this looks different. The footprint looks different. There's not so much permanent mobilization. Same in Zintan. Those groups are seen as providing a more socially accountable role. Whereas in Zawia, there's a continual presence of the armed groups and that was seen as oppressive. In fact, we really struggled to get people from Zawia to tell us anything about armed factions because there's a real climate of fear. And that's, I think, one of a real key difference. Similarly, what these cities saw their role as being within Libya was quite different. For the Mizrathans, they saw themselves as having kind of a national role. But while they could agree on their security sector protecting them, there's a kind of uncertainty about what Mizrata should do beyond its borders. In Zintan, I think there's kind of become a conviction after the failings or the disaster of 2014 that they should just focus on themselves and they should focus on protecting their interests, protecting access to Tripoli and protecting their business interests. Whereas in Zawia, the armed groups were seen as very very limited, having very limited accountability to the community and very much self-interested. I think I can skip through this a little bit. I just want to emphasize one point here which I think is important for the discussion to come in that when the armed groups operate within their city bounds they're seen as being under the city's social umbrella and that provides some kind of expectations and limiting role over the behaviors that they exhibit. But once they go outside of the city and once they operate somewhere else most of the community members were keen to disown those groups. They saw them as then becoming mercenaries or pawns of politicians and part of a broader problem. And I think this speaks to the dilemma in a way that the legitimacy that exists exists locally and it's very difficult to transpose that onto any form of national force which is not seen as being a national force it's seen as being self-interested and connected to particular backers. In the paper and in the work we've done quite a lot of explaining how these armed groups operate differently depending on what's available in the area. Clearly within Misrata, Misrata is a very successful city with a buoyant business sector. There are a larger number of opportunities available there whereas when we looked at Zauia in particular it's difficult to see if the armed groups don't do the trafficking and the infiltration of state institutions that they currently do what the alternatives will look like. And in fact all of these groups have been quite effective in covering their salaries and operating costs through the state and obtaining political patronage and that can be in state-owned enterprises where cousins of these leaders have now become placed on the board despite having no qualifications or increasingly I think seeking political power directly. That's something which we're going to see more and more in our elections. I think people like Fred Wary have made the point that these groups would seek to run many of their own candidates which would maybe not therefore bring some of the outcomes that the international community would assume would come with an election. But also there's a key dynamic of monetising territorial control. For the most part these groups remain based in the areas where they're from and they seek to control protection markets, trade routes and trafficking. That looks different in the different places but particularly notable in a place like Zintan that the community were quite open in saying that they thought that it was the armed group's role to help Zintanis pursue those business interests and push others out. So when you're becoming having a discussion about DDR or alternatives these social ports of buy-in are quite important things to cover. So I'll wrap up in the next minute or so but just to conclude from this so we've got three very different security sectors with some commonalities but clearly based upon local dynamics. And the very straightforward conclusion I think from that is that any DDR process that's going to take place in these locations needs to be tailored to those local dynamics. And I'll offer some thoughts as to what that looked like. Moreover, because these are social networks that are embedded in communities the process must also be social and not limited to the armed groups themselves. They're not a separate part of society. You have to broaden the conversation. I think in engaging communities more widely one of the goals has to be therefore to limit the amount of influence that armed groups are playing in the conversation. By making it all about security or by placing them in the top rooms to decide then that's also facilitating their growth. And when looking at different literatures about DDR and SSR how to plan it, how to sequence it it's clear that this is a deeply complex issue and very hard one but it's important that DDR can't wait. There's some conclusions that it's just too early given all of the circumstances I've mentioned but when will that point come? This is a dynamic situation looking at our network analysis following how these groups have become more and more embedded and integrated and controlling of the state's interests if you wait for the stars to align it's just going to become harder. So I offered some thoughts in terms of what this might look like in practice so that would offer almost a bit of a toolkit if you're looking to engage in one of these cities how would you decide what you would look to do or how you would support it and I've offered some thoughts here particularly of course the state of mobilization of the local forces in areas where the armed groups aren't permanently mobilized it gives you a lot more of a window to engage and particularly those forces that are permanently mobilized are also generally the ones that have consistent access to state resources and that's hard to switch off through a DDR process. I think one of the key measures has to be about increasing the level of accountability locally as I've mentioned so we've generally found that the violence is lower in these localities when the degree of social accountability is higher so what kind of interventions can be done to improve that increase that one idea is to have councils that will provide a link between citizens and the armed groups to negotiate and talk about how the groups can and should operate and I've suggested that in this sense there may be means of providing incentives towards doing that. In terms of alternative economic opportunities I think it's clearly equally here that the training measures are going to have to be catered to specific localities but there's a need I think to pivot the some of this discussion away from solely on the security sector to being more about things like local economic development and creating milestones where that you can create a virtuous circle by having negotiations between armed groups in the community but then also providing some benefits to those communities that will show that there are benefits to be gained by demilitarization effectively of those communities. Andrew, I think I've talked for way too long but hopefully that gives a sense of the landscape in these places and then some practical implications for policy. Why don't you come sit down and we'll talk about it a little bit more. No, thank you so much for this. I mean for people who are familiar with Libya it's a fascinating analysis very necessarily granular nothing can be done in Libya unless we have this level of detail as far as international assistance programming, supporting Libyans at the local level at the national level unless we have this level of analysis. I think a lot of people who are not familiar with Libya might not know how complex it can be and how fractured and atomized and I think we met originally I think some years ago when we were working on the Libyan expert economic commission with Hans Mellon and that also has its problems as far as decentralization and I think all of these things are connected but understanding that there is no federal system there is no sort of nested way of governance it applies to the security sector as well so I think it's really important that people understand this local dynamics but it takes a really long time and people that have worked on Libya for a long time like yourself to understand this and support the type of programming that would need to be done to help the security forces in DDR and SSR but I want to just take one second just a couple minutes to take a few steps back for a few people in the room who may not be as familiar with the Libyan context and I want to just start I left off and working with you and see where the project of state consolidation is as far as economic and politically so just briefly for everyone here could you please talk about the state of the political transition we know that people are trying to move towards elections we had W.S. Secretary mention that and we know it's a big project we've missed some milestones on that and then there's the economic front so can we start with sort of the political transition and the state of play where we are can you just give us a snapshot of where we are with that Sure, so I think the internationally mediated political track has continued to seek to affect elections in Libya based on the conclusion that only through elections can the current set of decision makers be replaced and can broader markers for progress be reached in terms of having an elected government that has a mandate to make the changes and to push forward the many against the many challenges that the state faces unfortunately though I think if you step back and look at that process the number of people involved in those negotiations has diminished over the years and it's become increasingly a discussion about getting key actors to sign on to something that at the very least they can't be sure that their interests will be served by backing so you've got this situation where the political track is seeking to have an open competition upon which Libyans can place their vote but all of the key Libyan players are seeking to control the outcome and only sign on if they know what the outcome will be which is counter-intuitive and we're at the point now where much of the SRSG's effort is about bringing together what the so-called a big five unfortunately lost in that broader set of negotiations are other representations from the Libyan population and in this impasse which has continued and the vacuum of a broader political process you've seen the armed groups kind of make hay the political figures know that if they're to succeed to be able to cut a deal you saw Fatih Bashaga for example straight up cut a deal with armed factions which he had concluded were beyond the pale and needed to be completely demobilized whilst he was minister of interior to say realizing that to be able to get into the capital he needed their support so the armed groups come from a set of networks that were quite distanced largely from that political power in 2011 but they're pretty quick studies they've learnt fast and I think the fact that we have two ministers of interior for the rival governments based you know one is a Zhentani armed group figure the other is a Zhaoyan armed group figure shows you the direction of travel that we're going here and I think this is a form of consolidation in a way but it's very volatile and we're seeing a lot of struggles on the northwest coast at the moment and it is a like a sometimes that's been held up as stability but actually I think what you're seeing is a narrowing of interests here and a form of state consolidation which is based purely on extracting the states resources and not putting anything back to the public yeah I mean I don't watch it every day like I used to but it seems to me that as we move in that direction there is a bit of a gap between what the intentions are of Libyans and of the international community to support an inclusive process, the national reconciliation process the national dialogue that's been talked about supported by the African Union and others and also what's going on at the community level very directly applicable to what you're talking about in DDR and where the real power brokers are and what they're taking seriously and whether or not there's a cynicism about these sort of other efforts we have to I think but anyway I would think that people would need to break down this cynicism and really blend these two things including the social aspects that you talk about in the DDR process so that they are serious but I think to do that you need to bring in leverage for certain players at the national level and the local level so let's get into that I'm glad this slide is up and we can talk about how particularly integrating the local social accountability within the DDR process is possible without programming that's just distinct from the realities on the ground but just for a moment because I know this is another of your expertise could you give us a two minute overview of the sort of economic conditions with a focus on where we are with the development process and there are some big investments, foreign investments going into Libya as I understand it and the oil sector still continues to pump out so the sort of macroeconomic factors quickly and then jump down to this effort of equitable distribution of the revenues and how those efforts are or are not working because I think this plays into the overall stability and then we'll get back into the DDR conversation. Sure so as I was intimating on the political side I think that the there's been a search for this Libyan led process I think actually that the political process is now Libyan led by these key figures and that's being reflected and responded to by the internationals rather than directly mediating it and I think you can apply the same in the economic space you can see that the interests of armed actors have become more approximate to power I mentioned appointments to key states owned enterprises and we've seen increasing pressure come on the oil sector in a largely unprecedented fashion I think actually in the last couple of years as the deals being cut between these rival factions have kind of moved upstream and closer to the sources of funds and that's something which is I think reaping increasing damage upon the economy so one of the things that Libyan economists have pointed out recently is that you know if you look in the black market the DNR has fallen at a time where there isn't a broader oil crisis you know actually I think sometimes these things on the economic side can be harder to see and often international interests are whether the oil keeps flowing but the ability of the state to maintain this degree of pervasive like rapacious extraction I think is going to come increasing under threat and there's no way to incentivize any of these players to limit what they take and this is kind of a problem so on the economic side I think that you're seeing very open deals being cut and even I think after the horrendous tragedy of Derna and the Green Mountain which I think according to some statistics may have killed more people than all of the conflicts in 2011 combined so that shows you as well these are things that Libyans care about nobody resigned there's no East West deal over how to reconstruct that yet and we're a few months on so this kind of national level malaise I think also gets to your point about what you can do locally and these are where the opportunities are more clear and present of course that creates other challenges in terms of how you are able to pursue locally based strategies without frustrating or further pushing back on kind of state level efforts and I think this is where I've tried to come up with some ideas as to how you might create approaches which are replicable in other areas and incentivize and change the conversation away from just being about whether you can control this entity or that entity and making it more of a virtuous circle in terms of unleashing economic incentives and empowering and helping to empower local communities push back against some of the worst excesses of the armed groups thank you for that so finally I just wanted to the last snapshot question and we noticed in the report several you said in all three cities the residents all voiced some concern of an outbreak of national level violence so with that political and economic sort of outlook that you provide and you have these snapshots there but you obviously follow the broader security situation we've had outbreaks of violence in Tripoli we've had crackdowns in Benghazi fairly recently what do you think is the probability of a further national level violence because it obviously will play into any plans we have for DDR I think it's important to note that these are the perceptions of the community members so those perceptions are colored by previous rounds of conflict and many of these communities have paid the cost paid the price of those conflicts in terms of lost family members, lost sons damage, things that still haven't been put right, we're talking about reconstruction in Derna there are a whole bunch of places that have been devastated by conflict in Libya that have had no little to no reconstruction take place but it's clear that the dynamics that we see which is a kind of Hobbesian power struggle for direct extraction of resources it's more likely to result in an outbreak of further conflict because the one mechanism that the state has developed to deal with that is to basically parcel out more resources and they're finite particularly on the northwest coast though where that monetization of territory is so critical in terms of controlling routes you can see that actually there's quite a large quite a high potential for further significant outbreaks of fighting there and we've seen over the course of this year drone strikes in Zawia by the GNU claiming to target criminal elements but it happened to be the areas which were controlled by the groups which were antagonistic to the GNU we're seeing Zawia refinery come under the crosshairs so I think that's likely to be the face of ongoing fighting it's likely to be battles over those kind of parochial interests that being said you can also see a scenario in which in the efforts to create a new technocratic government would invert the commas over that technocratic part there's going to be a negotiation in the security sector and you've got a large like the preponderance of the Zintani security sector and the outside looking in in terms of the state you've got the Abu Ghra who are who are very antagonistic as well you've got ambitious central Zawia axis so we're constantly seeing these these limits being tested and also this year it's worth noting that we saw quite significant fighting in a civilian area between Tripoli based groups so it seems a bit more difficult to envisage a LAF attempt to at something being replicated like Hafter's attempt to take over Tripoli but I think sometimes the lack of country-wide fighting has been perceived as stability from the outside but this is really inherently not stable and there isn't a conversation around these things which are very closely wedded to issues like DDR that's taking place that's credible in my view so now I'll leave it to the audience to talk specifically we've got some DDR experts in IFC here and several friends and colleagues so yes we'll just take hands now I think there's a mic coming around first of all fantastic I mean I really flipping through the report and hearing you speak this really really needed to be written I just it's just a helpful and I'm thinking sort of Clifford Geertz you know we need an ethnography of Libyan malicious with case studies to really dig into what all the issues are and I love the choice of cases because of the way they contrast there's an ethnic side of this which you sort of hinted at in Zintan that I wondered if you could comment on the whole Berber side of this and I don't know if it's in the report there's also armed groups prior to 2011 I don't know if you looked into that but like in Ronan's book the drug gangs the rev comms I was wondering if you could comment about the pre-revolutionary malicious and how that fit into this and let's call it to keep the question short traumas right the trauma of Gaddafi the trauma of the Civil War the trauma of the 2014 sorry the 2011 revolution the 2014 assault in 2019 I mean there's two aspects when I think of malicious it's partially the embeddedness in the local context which you're absolutely right about maybe that is the most important thing but it's also the revolutionary posture of most of them and it's the protection of the community against those fears you know almost explaining to some degree why the Zawian are so nervous about even talking about it right that ties back to those traumas I mean Zawian is one of the most understudied sites of the massacres of 2011 which the story still hasn't been told except that short documentary that was locally produced so so three other little things you can just respond to if you want to you may remember that crisis group with SS with small arms survey did that survey in 2012 tax-onmising the militias into four groups revolutionary post-revolutionary and then the small ones the illegals and the the jihadist the second to the third and fourth category being really small I was wondering if that kind of played into your thinking because the post-revolutionary versus the revolutionary is really important that the second little thing you might want to respond to is we often get informal economy wrong and I was wondering if you could distinguish between black economy and what you might call gray economy because I think we always talk about the black side of what the militias are involved in and not just provision of local services you know and illicit but gray and necessary economic transactions which is huge the same toyotas the same you know and then the last thing is and riffing off of one of the things you said about two thirds of the way through what if it's just the case that DDR and SSR are impossible until you have the ultimate peace deal and the ultimate reconciliation because these groups see themselves as I'm from Boston just defending the community until they don't need to keep those weapons anymore what if it's just so what if we're just planning, planning, planning that's fine but planning until we have the ultimate reconciliation and then the DDR and SSR as you're implying through the whole talk is an organic thing that grows out of the macro resolution rather than thinking as is often wrongly we realize that we have to kind of force things before Libya is at peace with itself thank you so much do you want to take some of those thank you very very good points on the revolutionary side I think this is an interesting one because it's also there's a question of what it means to be revolutionary as well which is different in different cities Libya can be one of the most frustrating places to draw blanket conclusions but the experience of revolution across these different cities is very different and the roles as I intimated that those cities see themselves as playing is different and so for the Zintanes having some accordance with the elements of the former regime was a sensible decision that what was by no means a betrayal of the revolution but for many in Misrata that was and I think there's a question of what it means to be revolutionary today and I think that's even more complicated as the affiliations and the negotiations become muddier you know you've got a lot of lines being crossed particularly through elicit interests with your point on the taxonomy of what's a revolutionary group versus an outright criminal group versus you know a more formal group I've found that mostly impossible to distinguish when you go locally and this may be an overly sympathetic view but the preponderance of the groups that are focused on criminal sources of revenue largely in the areas where there aren't as many alternative sources of revenue available and also the social origins of those groups tend to be from lower socio-economic backgrounds as well so they've gone for more direct forms of revenue generation so in that sense militias versus armed groups and we've had a lot of discussion about hybridity and things like that here but it seems to me that local perceptions and those local understandings remain the dominant feature still so I think you've got to engage with those and try and come up with some common goals in terms of the roles that the armed group should play within those communities and now I don't want to oversimplify that in a place like Zauia transforming its economy is an incredibly big challenge particularly when you don't have a national development strategy you don't have development spending unlocked you've got so it's really really difficult to see some of these things but I do think that having that local understanding you also mentioned about things based around ethnicity people's understandings of what's going on are very very localized and this is I think this dilemma that you can achieve most locally but those local balances of power might also be quite unjust to elements of the community as well so how do you do that and how do you do that in a way which doesn't frustrate a national process that seems to be the main challenge and I would just say in terms of whether that follows a big deal I think that these processes are so dynamic that these groups are still growing that if you wait it will be too late and so I think you've got to actually try and look at changing the nature of the conversation and doing what you can while you can accepting that there will be limits to that and just finally on the black and grey economy so I found some interesting examples of Zintani armed groups basically strong-arming people into contracts in the oil sector formal contracts that get audited but very clearly there were some companies that won and they had some connections and the other companies did not and so right right there's some service provisions so you found Zari and armed groups basically offering grandmother's access to banking services that they would otherwise be unable to get but why are they able to operate offer that because they were basically dipping their finger in the bank so you know there's a lot here and I think increasingly distinguishing as well between Libya's formal and informal black and white economies has become kind of impossible because most economic activities seem to have an element of both and everybody is reliant on the black market these days which is why you see some of the biggest political discourse come around when the black market rate skyrockets because it has such a direct impact on people straight away and what they pay for things, what they've got so hopefully I covered some of those things Thank you. Is there any other questions? Yes, Mona sorry I have to yield to the vice president with two colleagues I'll make it very quick thank you so much Tim this was fascinating it's a clear takeaway that it's local dynamics hyper local dynamics it sounds like that really drive an understanding of these armed groups and therefore efforts at DDR one question that came to mind though as you were speaking if it's relevant is the role of foreign fighters and is there an intersection between Wagner or other foreign fighters who may be on the ground I'm not current on Libya I don't know if there's still Syrian fighters on the ground or others but to what extent at all does that factor into your analysis thanks I'll just go one for one I was told that's what I'm supposed to do okay it's a really good question I think in the analysis going on the LAF a while ago this was a bigger factor but it was notable that many people told us for example that Xueli's forces included a large number of mercenaries and foreign mercenaries in these three cities I don't see the role of foreign fighters to be particularly influential though in each of the contexts they exist to play specific roles overall I've tended to find that there's some quite slightly perverse findings that after the 2019-20 war the presence of foreign militaries have probably helped to prevent a larger outbreak of conflict but still you do see a wide number of locations and particularly with relation to the south this is highly controversial with issues over citizenship and nationality I think fundamentally it's not a very good answer to your question but where I think they come in in these contexts is that it's the ability to coercively control key assets that allows these armed groups and their broader communities to benefit from the resources of the state so as long as that remains the kind of dynamic I think you're going to continue to see those types of actors be employed particularly when there is a large outbreak of conflict Sejuele was probably using those figures because he needed to move and control further territory and actually trying to work out just how many men at arms in each Libyan group think this isn't a military analysis at all but it was clear that to do that he also needed to draw upon additional resources and they used the money to pay for foreign fighters to do that but I don't see them playing an autonomous role within these three cities Just a two finger on that and Chris I'll come right to you and I know we're running out of time but even the Mizrata case not foreign fighters or mercenaries but forward military Turkish fighters and the ties between Mizrata and Turkey for long standing when does that play into post-2020 security dynamics what about that aspect of it? Yeah absolutely, I mean the role of Turkey is central if you look in Tripoli look at the 444 the recent outbreaks of fighting there's a social kind of element to that in terms of these armed groups that have come out of the Tripoli suburb of Sukujuma and in terms of the head of the 444 there's a targeted one by Turkey and getting too big for his boots I think is the essence of why that fighting took place but Turkey is running some of its own programming here it is training groups particularly groups like the 444 and there are key commanders that have had long standing relations with Turkey and have sought to draw upon those resources to improve the equipment and training of their armed groups I think as I mentioned the record of that is slightly mixed but it's definitely a factor and I think nobody anticipates But you see it mainly in the capital it's not playing into these local dynamics of specific... Well Bin Rajeb actually has been a significant and basically Namrush was one of the principal go-betweens with Turkey so actually one of the main reasons that one of the Zauya Axis has become more influential militarily is also because of that sanctioned support from Turkey so each of these groups as they become bigger does need to obtain the acquiescence at least of the big players outside of the country and so the Zintanes were funded by Emiratis in 2011 Of course you've got Hufta all of these players have had and they've utilized it to try and pursue their genders Sure Hi Chris and Min a program on violent extremism here at USIP I'm just curious your last slide had a bunch of how questions and you had done some interviews or polling I'm not sure what with local community members I'm just curious if they had ideas about how to do all of those things and also how and who of those local community members need to have a seat at the table and how can we help ensure that they get there Thank you It's a great question actually I think we didn't at the time of the community interviews ask them how they thought the security sector should be reformed we probably should have to be honest we were quite careful in some of the way we were asking those questions because these are quite sensitive dynamics and we were quite keen that the interviews didn't make it seem like we could really take out armed groups but one idea and I think that decaf is looking at this and is how do you create some kind of accountability mechanism with communities and who in the community should participate in that of course you have municipal councils but in a number of these instances the municipal councils have basically surrogates of the armed groups this is that's a challenge I think that having some kind of interface in these cities between the communities and the armed groups that over key issues about weapons management about codes of conduct I think would be a thing to go that you could replicate across the country and I think would work quite well and some people that you'll get into the debate whether that should be through elders you know pre-existing mediation mechanisms I think actually it would need to be something quite different and what you would want to target there are some approaches that could be replicated across different geographies that would create kind of like a common baseline that seems to be the most workable way of achieve or pushing that route though of course there'll be challenges to that right the armed groups will try and penetrate the a committee like that there could be pressure placed upon them so that's where I think there would be a strong role for the international community to support and push those types of efforts it feels to me that there's a broad consensus or a conclusion that's been drawn by many implementers and internationals that coming up with a national SSR strategy is very difficult and that there are more opportunities at the local level but that now needs to be fleshed out into something a bit more strategic that can be replicated because what I see at the moment are largely disconnected efforts looking at different things from pre-DDR to DDR to some things which are SSR related and there needs to be some kind of common framework that that connects to and I think the centerpiece of that should be community accountability well we've run out of time we've gone over time thank you so much and thank you Tim for this phenomenal report thank you SSS Secretary Morgato for coming thank you everyone for joining us today and I really encourage you to really read the report it's really fascinating thank you very much bye