George Joffé
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198749028
- eISBN:
- 9780191811630
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198749028.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
Despite the autocratic nature of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, its weakness in Cyrenaica (Libya’s eastern province) became apparent in the 1990s. A series of protests there over specific issues—the ...
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Despite the autocratic nature of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, its weakness in Cyrenaica (Libya’s eastern province) became apparent in the 1990s. A series of protests there over specific issues—the deaths at Abu Salim prison in 1996, the children’s AIDS crisis in Benghazi, and the cartoons protest in 2006—allowed embryonic social movements using civil resistance to emerge. Regime attempts to suppress demonstrations linked to these events provoked a general uprising against it in Cyrenaica in mid-February 2011, which spread into Tripolitania and the Fezzan (the western and southern provinces respectively). Although civil society flourished after the removal of the Gaddafi regime, the failure of formal governance over the next four years led to extremist attempts to suppress any manifestation of civil resistance. The reasons for this are rooted in the nature of the previous regime as well as in the way in which the Libyan revolution evolved.Less
Despite the autocratic nature of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, its weakness in Cyrenaica (Libya’s eastern province) became apparent in the 1990s. A series of protests there over specific issues—the deaths at Abu Salim prison in 1996, the children’s AIDS crisis in Benghazi, and the cartoons protest in 2006—allowed embryonic social movements using civil resistance to emerge. Regime attempts to suppress demonstrations linked to these events provoked a general uprising against it in Cyrenaica in mid-February 2011, which spread into Tripolitania and the Fezzan (the western and southern provinces respectively). Although civil society flourished after the removal of the Gaddafi regime, the failure of formal governance over the next four years led to extremist attempts to suppress any manifestation of civil resistance. The reasons for this are rooted in the nature of the previous regime as well as in the way in which the Libyan revolution evolved.
