Paper short abstract:

This presentation intends to focus on the role Libya played in Chad, Central African Republic, and other countries in Sahel, focusing on the continuities and transformations in the Libyan role

Paper long abstract:

While, at first glance, Qaddafi Libya's role in Africa has been most often described as a destabilising one, the reality is more nuanced, complex, and changing. This presentation intends to focus on the role Libya played in Chad, Central African Republic, and other countries in Sahel. It illustrates some permanencies in different contexts such as the will to be able to talk to all parties at the same time, a strong opposition, or distrust in front of any actor external to the continent and mixed attitudes towards would-be African regional powers.

Stability is more than often the efficient management of a certain kind of disorder. Qaddafi being overthrown, we enter in a period when all States and non-States actors in Libya's peripheries need to redefine what (in) stability means while Libya has to settle its own internal order. Crises in Fezzan/Chad, Mali, and CAR are to a certain extent the illustration of a new regional order yet to define.