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Dr. Hanspeter Mattes is a Senior Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies in Hamburg, Germany. Since 2010, he has had overall responsibility (together with Stephan Rosiny) for the series GIGA Focus. And since February 2007 he has served as Deputy Director of the GIGA Institute, where his work has focused on Libya, Sudan, and Algeria, with respect to the development of political institutions, processes of transformation, soft-security problems and aspects of foreign policy cooperation.
Challenges to State Building after the Fall of Qaddafi
The fall of the Qaddafi regime and the loss of the state monopoly on violence gave way to a duopoly of power in Libya whereby rudimentary “national” forces—under the control of the National Transitional Council (NTC) from March 2011 to August 2012—were established in competition with the non-state “Revolutionary Brigades,” which had borne the brunt of the military struggle against Qaddafi’s forces. Since then, the Revolutionary Brigades have increasingly sought to assert themselves in the political arena.
