Libya

The territory of modern Libya has been inhabited since prehistory, with rock art in the Acacus and Tadrart ranges attesting to a once greener Sahara populated by hunting and pastoral peoples. By the first millennium BCE the coastal strip had become a meeting ground of Berber populations and Mediterranean colonisers. Phoenicians from Tyre established trading posts at Oea, Sabratha, and Lepcis Magna, the three settlements that gave Tripolitania its name, while in the east Greek colonists from Thera founded Cyrene around 631 BCE and developed the five city Pentapolis of Cyrenaica. Both regions passed in turn under Carthaginian, Ptolemaic, and finally Roman control, and Lepcis Magna became the home city of the emperor Septimius Severus. After the Vandal invasion of the fifth century CE and a Byzantine reconquest under Justinian, the coast was incorporated into the Arab caliphate following the campaigns of Amr ibn al As in the 640s, beginning a lasting Arabisation and Islamisation of the population, deepened by the migrations of the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in the eleventh century.

For most of the medieval and early modern periods the three historical provinces, Tripolitania in the northwest, Cyrenaica in the east, and the Saharan Fezzan in the southwest, followed distinct trajectories under successive Berber, Fatimid, Almohad, and Hafsid authorities. From 1551 the Ottoman Empire asserted suzerainty over the coast, with Tripoli serving as a corsair port and, between 1711 and 1835, as the seat of the autonomous Karamanli dynasty before direct Ottoman rule was restored. In the interior the Sanusi religious order, founded in 1837, came to organise much of Cyrenaica and the Fezzan around its lodges and trans Saharan trade.

Italy invaded the Ottoman vilayets in 1911 and, after prolonged resistance led most famously by Omar al Mukhtar in Cyrenaica, consolidated its colony as Italian Libya in 1934. Allied campaigns during the Second World War drove Italian and German forces from the country, and from 1943 Libya was administered by Britain and France pending a United Nations decision on its future. Independence came on 24 December 1951, when the United Kingdom of Libya was proclaimed under King Idris I, the head of the Sanusi order, initially as a federation of the three provinces and from 1963 as a unitary state.

On 1 September 1969 a group of officers led by Muammar Gaddafi deposed the monarchy and established the Libyan Arab Republic, later restyled the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The new order combined Arab nationalism, a distinctive doctrine set out in the Green Book, the nationalisation of the oil industry, and a long period of confrontation with Western states that included United Nations sanctions over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. A rapprochement in the 2000s ended Libya's isolation but did not survive the protests that began in February 2011.

The 2011 uprising, supported by a NATO led intervention authorised by the United Nations, ended with Gaddafi's death and the collapse of his state. Subsequent transitions produced rival administrations and a second civil war from 2014, partially settled by a 2020 ceasefire and a Libyan Political Dialogue Forum that installed a Government of National Unity in Tripoli, while a parallel authority backed by the House of Representatives operated from the east. Libya is today a republic in transition, divided in practice between competing executives pending long delayed national elections.