The rise and fall of non-state armed groups (NSAGS) in Libya: What determines their fate?

NSAGs vary greatly in terms of their success rate, lifespan, identity, nature, level of violence, enjoyed legitimacy and so on. Among all qualities of NSAGs, the factors that enable them to prosper, flourish, expand, and establish control and authority over a certain territory; as well as the factors that pave the way and foreshadow their defeat, dissolution, dismantlement, and demise are especially important to know and understand. This study aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on NSAGs by offering a framework for explaining why certain NSAGs thrive and expand while others shrink and dissolve despite sharing temporal and spatial commonalities. This study attempts to provide a peculiar approach to the question building on an original set of case studies from Libya. Libya was chosen as the theatre and the main case study of this work due to its suitability for this kind of inquiry since phenomena such as civil war, state collapse, fragmented or partial state authority, violent extremism, an abundance of all sorts of armed groups and even hybrid and semi-state formations are all present in the country since the toppling of the former ruler Colonel Muammar Gadhafi in 2011. Libya provides one of the few cases even in the wider Middle East where a sustained and protracted authority vacuum is partly filled by numerous competitive armed formations. In a way, Libya has been a 'heaven' and hence, a 'laboratory' for both similar and starkly different NSAGs at the same time.