Guerrilla History - Everyday Politics in Gaddafi's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya w/ Matteo Capasso

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

In this terrific episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on our comrade and friend Matteo Capasso to discuss his fantastic book Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, a work based on oral histories and "provides a unique and vivid look into the political dynamics that characterized the everyday lives of Libyans, offering a compelling counterargument to those who insist on framing the history of the country as a stateless, authoritarian, and rogue state".  Really great conversation and a really important book, we already have plans for Matteo to come back on in a coming miniseries set to drop this summer! Matteo Capasso is the editor of the invaluable journal Middle East Critique (on twitter @MidEastCritique), and his work pertains to political economy and international relations.  He is a Marie Curie Fellow between the University of Venice and Columbia University.  In addition to picking up his book, you can follow him on twitter @capassomat. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember den, Ben, who? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a ranker. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to. Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts,

Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Usain, historian, director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing really well, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you. It's great to see you as well. We have an excellent guest, somebody who I really were long over-deged. do in talking to, to be quite frank, and talking about a really excellent book. But before I introduce the guests and the book, I want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on

Twitter to keep up with everything that we're putting out individually as well as the show collectively by following us at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore-Pod. So, as I mentioned, we have a really great guest today. We're joined by Matteo Capasso, who is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Columbia and University of Venice,

editor of Middle East Pritique, an author of the book that we're going to be talking about today, everyday politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahariya. Hello, Matteo. It's nice to have you on the show. Thank you. Henry, thank you, Adnan, for having me here. Definitely long overdue to have a nice discussion, the two of you. Yeah, absolutely. I was just telling you before we hit record that we're long overdue because I read this book last year the first time and then I reread it in advance of this conversation. And I really enjoyed the book. It's a very important book to re-contextualize the history of kind of modern Libya as we tend to think of more of the broad political moves and think of it.

in terms of, you know, what was Garfi doing at this given time rather than thinking about the perspective of the everyday. And so this is going to be a really great conversation and one that I have a lot to ask about. Just to lay it out there before I turn it over to Adnan to introduce the series that this episode is going to be part of, we're only going to be talking about the everyday part of this book and not the broader, you know, history of Libya within this episode because we are going to be bringing you and a Libyan comrade of yours back on the show soon to be part of our upcoming, and I guess I can announce it now, a series on African revolutions and decolonization, which will be coming out listeners very soon.

And so stay tuned for that. But because we are going to be focusing on that historic, that broader history in that next episode, we're going to be focusing on the everyday and the methodology of the everyday. As a result, this is going to be part of our sources and methods series of episodes and longtime listeners who have heard other episodes of the series know that this is the time where I turn it over to Adnan to introduce this series and take the first question, Adnan. Sure, thanks, Henry, and welcome, Matteo. We're really looking forward to this conversation,

partly because we've had a number of episodes recently where we've looked at rather unique approaches to understanding history. either by looking at primary documents and sources and understanding the mechanics of how historians have to try and analyze the past, what's the evidence they use, and similarly, what are the methodologies that they have to use sometimes in order to be able to interpret unconventional kinds of information. Most history, most is based on documentation, usually produced, say, by government, government records. That isn't always possible. And one of the reasons why I'm so intrigued by your book and by this project on the everyday politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiri is because there isn't actually a lot that tends to be written about Libya because there's so many challenges to access to these sources and so on. And also because the portrayal of Libya, which you talk about a little bit in the introduction, as a very unique non-state or rogue state and, you know, this kind of anatomy of the pathologies of Libyan nationhood and statehood, if you can say, kind of distorts this whole perspective on it. So we would be very keen to talk a little bit about, you know, how you frame and situate this work.

You're somebody who's interested in political economy and kind of these everyday politics. But there's a reason, there are reasons why very little is published about Libya and, you know, particularly your approach and interest in Libya. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about the conception of the book and, you know, any of the major obstacles or challenges you encountered in trying to perform this research and get it, you know, through to publication. Thank you, Adnan. Thank you, Henry, again, for inviting me to be here with you and to kickstart this conversation around the book. I mean, where should I start? Let's say that every book as a reality that goes beyond its pages, you know, read a book, and you think about these are the ideas that the author is trying to convey.

Well, you know, these ideas are also part of a structural system itself, in the sense that you need to get to the point where the book is published. And to get to that point, you need to make sure that there is a whole bunch of people who are going to academics, experts, and so on and so forth, that are going to basically vet the book and say, okay, this is solid, research-wise, methodologically, the argument is good. The book has a history on the upfront. The book is starts, it draws on my doctoral research, which was eventually, you know, updated. The analysis was changed because in the process, you know, you also change your ideas. You, you know, you develop in a way intellectually and you, and I started rewriting it, rearranging parts here and there. But in that process, I also encountered definitely major obstacles. And one of them, was the review process. So once the book was, the very first draft of the manuscript was done, you know, I approached

after, you know, being invited to do so, a major UK university press. The book goes through, gets reviewed, and at none, you know, very well, it takes a long time to get the review process through a university press. And, you know, you just wait, you think, okay, everything, you know, we're going to wait, we're going to get some comments in here. there. Now, what changed between the, what was the thesis and the book,

certainly was partly the conclusion. The conclusion and also the framing of the everyday so the understanding that you cannot approach everyday life devoid or divorced from the structural contradictions that exist

at the geopolitical and international level. So, on that front, the analysis was strengthened and on my own, according to me. But at the same time, I became and realized that what had happened in 2011 could not be, you know, labeled as simply as a revolutionary uprising.

It was a NATO-led regime change which banked on the contradictions existing within the country and then eventually, you know, destroyed Libya. Well, you know, I have to say, it is because, you know, all these are part, this is also part of the different drafts, you know, because when I get the reviews from this major UK press, I am told that the author should be thankful that NATO intervened because otherwise he wouldn't have a book in the first place. And I am quoting, I mean, I have the reviews with me.

It's not uncommon. The thing is, why do I start from here? because what is knowledge and what is reality and what is objectivity in that process, you know, and this is where we realize that we need to get into politics immediately. Because the way we understand reality, the way we understand the foundations of what we think it is a fact or a thing, then eventually it's sifted through not just our positionality, but the structure in which we're in. And so the moment this type of knowledge was vetoed, you start realizing that there is no willingness to discuss Libya in a certain way. There is no willingness to basically say that what happened was an military intervention from Western powers that destroyed the country.

And in that process, then, the next draft, which Syracuse eventually supported, gets even more, in a way, even more, I wouldn't call it radical, but it's, according to me, it's transcends even more the analysis, and it convinces me that this is the way to go, you know. It doesn't matter what they, they wanted a book about the resistance of the people against an authoritarian state. What I found was that you had people who certainly had numerous, you know, doubts and, you know, discontent towards the Libyan government. But from there to the destruction of the country, it's a leap that could only have happened with a NATO intervention. And so this is important to say because basically it continues up to this day when you look and you just look at the kind of book reviews that come out on my book by a bunch of think tank people and they call it revisionist. And it is all important to understand this because you are not just locating a book and ideas.

You are locating yourself also in a debate and eventually you're going to find obstacles and doors closed even within the academic environment. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up a little bit on that. This is very profound to reveal the stakes that are involved. You know, people think, oh, a scholar just, you know, writes what they're interested in. They do their research and, you know, people will have these disagreements and there it is available for everyone, you know, to see the outcomes of the research. but this peer review process, which is partly to establish certain, you know, standards and so on, is also a disciplining, you know, element.

And what you're pointing out is that politics entered from the very beginning that it was not possible or not easy to articulate a thesis about what happened in 2011. And that is a precondition for understanding, you know, the people's experiences beforehand. So this is almost in some sense for a historian, the exact, you know, this is revealing the way in which it's not possible actually or very easy to do the story of the past without unpacking the politics of articulating that story and the various narratives and counter narratives in the present. And so what I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this was, do you feel? that perhaps when we refer to what are these narratives, that the contestation, or maybe it's not even that contested is the whole point, in the West, the, you know, kind of consensus narrative that, you know, the Libyan people rose up and if anything NATO was merely helping and reacting to the people's kinds of decision. Whether, you know, we have to put this in the context of, the wider narratives and the confusions and contradictions of the whole Arab Spring, period, you know. And I'm wondering what you think about, about that. When you were entering into this, did you first feel that you were participating in this wave of scholarship that came out, right? You know, in the 2010s, valorizing, you know, the Arab Spring and creating a kind of romantic,

popular resistance narrative, but that you found that there was, you know, how do you parse, I guess, the place of Libya and your kind of encounter with this kind of story and problem in the larger kind of contestations, maybe differentiations that need to be made about what happened in the Arab Spring, to what extent it is a part of the same process, to what extent it has its own unique genealienable. just wonder how you reflect on on on that kind of problem yeah none it's it's absolutely connected I mean in the sense that there is the way in Middle Eastern studies was producing knowledge right before 2011 was and Libya was part of this was there they were looking at these Arab regimes because they used to call them regimes which at times it makes sense to call them regimes but it's it makes sense to call them regimes but it You know, they are governments like any other state. So there was a structure in place and so on and so forth.

We'll get there anyway. So the old type of knowledge production that was being advanced was that how did those rulers manage to stay in power for so long? Basically, the so-called literature on authoritarianness. So that was up to 2011. That was the mainstream, especially I'm talking about the field of international relations and politics because that's where I come from. So we're looking at that and you see the persistence of authoritarianism.

Reasons of authoritarianism is still standing in Egypt. And also kind of a hypothesis about, you know, this is happening. They're strong and so on and so forth. Constantly, again, devoid and divorced from any geopolitical analysis and so on and so forth. Okay? So, and we have all these beautiful categories about fail state. So you've got a failed state, but it's a strong state. is an authoritarian state,

saw this kind of abstract pictures and very static. There's no history in them. You just look at the Arab world and you see all these different regimes that they are still standing despite all these contradictions and so on and so forth. 2011 kicks in.

Now, 2011, we have to talk about 2011 because this is actually part of my current project. But anyway, what is 2011? Now, 2011 is certain a moment of protest. A protest and revolt to a certain extent, okay? But it's also a civil war in the region, in how we are going to move forward.

How is this region going to be integrated vis-à-vis the global political economy and the global order? And I think this is, I think 2000, we look back at 2011, and we're really going to be looking at one of the major civil war that took place in the airport. That's the way I think, when I look back now, that's what I'm thinking it happened there. But the reaction, sorry. You mean a little bit like perhaps when you can say in the late 50s, 60s, you have the Arab Cold War, basically, right? You've got Nasir, populist movements, and it's affiliations and alliances, and you have the reactionary Arab regimes and so on.

So something like that, a major moment of contestation. That makes a lot of sense to me, yes. Absolutely. A major moment of contestation where you see. This wave of, yes, revolts, but revolts also that are inherently liberal, that they have no structural understanding of the conditions around them, and also the level of infiltration that is taking place inside these movements. What, you know, we could use even the category of color revolutions for many of them, because

that's what we were seeing. But that was not the reaction back in the days. You know, the reaction was exactly what you pointed out, which is. this absolutely romanticization of revolt and protest. So what we're looking is authoritarian state on the one hand. The people clobbered and disciplined and so on and so forth. In 2011 you got all these people writing a book about protest, revolt, agency, social movements, and so on and so forth. You're burping, you are a hero.

You're farting, I don't know what's happening. You know, it's like you're doing something. This is, and some people come up with non-social movements, a social movements, anything starts to have a value. That's liberalism to you. The idea that at the individual level, everybody's resisting, but there is no structural ideology that this makes them really change the system. So, here it comes to Libya. Now, 42 years of Gaddafi, because that's what the literature was saying, and I'm sure we're going to talk about. So, 42 years of authoritarianism, the people.

have made their choice. They want the regime gone. You know, the whole thing we want regime gone. And the Facebook, the virtual, the social media revolution, and so on and so forth. There is literally, it's certainly a projection, also from many leftists that they were studying the Arab world, of this idea that we are so stagnant that maybe there something is happening. And so we put this massive intellectual weight to movements. that actually haven't really done.

And I'm not trying to diminish the value because lots of lives have been lost during that time. But at the same time, this romanticization has created the false belief that this were purely revolution. And so when you publish a book about Libya and you are basically saying, look, the way we studied Libya didn't make much much sense. And at the same time, in doing that, your final thesis is that, what happened in 2011, is that really a revolution?

Ha, you know, I think you can see now. Yeah, so I want to hop in what, you know, you're talking about how there's this total focus on, you know, revolt or protest. I find your book to be a great corrective to this totalizing of, you know, political trajectories within the country to this. event. And it's something that you point out really clearly at the end of your book. You know, it's interesting that you don't mention dialectics at all in the book until the conclusion of the book. And then you sneak it in there right at the end. Very clever, Mateo, you know, to get it past the checkers of, you know, the peer review process, you know, mentioned dialectics only in the conclusion of the book. But anyway, I lost that capacity. Wow. I was glad. I was glad that. I mean,

it's very clear as a reader of the book that you're approaching this from this dialectical perspective you just don't explicitly spell it out until the end I do appreciate the clarity at that point though but yeah it is definitely clear throughout but I want to point out a couple of the quotes about how you look at this in a dialectical way

because it might help the listeners understand the way in which this is typically portrayed compared to the way in which you are looking at this so I'm going to quote a couple points from the book just quickly. What you say is the dialectical relationship between the everyday and the international functioned as a metronome to understand the rhythms of political change that characterized the Jamaharia since the late 1980s.

It allowed identifying a set of main modalities of political interaction that shed light on the contradictory transformations following the defeat and limitations of the 1969 revolution under the geopolitical threat of war and international sanctions. A couple pages later, you say, I argue that the conceptual value of events, revolutions, and ruptures can be epistemologically more romantic but less explanatory and analytical if lacking its dialectical partner, the every day. And just a couple, one page after that, you mentioned, the everyday, however, can provide a more reliable index of historical development than the brief sporadically erupting event.

possibly can be. It should be treated as the dialectical partner of the event, in quote, which would have no backdrop against which to emerge. I'm wondering if you can explain this dialectical relationship as you see it to the listeners who haven't perhaps read the book yet and definitely should, because as I said, it's clear throughout the book that you're approaching the every day as a dialectical partner to the overall event, and you do contextualize that within the book. The beginning of the book is focused on the events and the history at the beginning of the revolutionary period before then delving into the everyday. And so this dialectical relationship is quite clear, but perhaps you can elaborate a little bit on the importance of viewing it as a

dialectical relationship for our listeners and encourage them to, you know, think about this in that way rather than this totalizing event-based historical structure. Thanks, Henry. I mean, it's it's a very thoughtful question and I do know that when you read the book it's not really clear where this is coming from. I mean, it's inevitable. It's also part of a personal intellectual development that I had

myself, you know, in the sense that when this book, actually when this thesis was put together, I had been aggressively you know, like put under the

weight, the ideological weight of post-structuralism and the studies that they were coming in relation to this huge wave of so-called resistance in 2011. So the idea was that when you look at the every day, you're looking at this massive, like this constant capacity of people to resist. And we go back to what? Which I'm sure you got as no as the works of James Scott. You know, the whole idea of the. every day, people pushing against structure on and on and so on and so forth.

And then you had the event, and this connects the event, the whole idea of the event, especially in this book for me, was coming from the work of a Lombardier. This idea of the Massim event that, you know, it's coming, it's revealing, something is happening, and so they were looking at this revolution, and there was a lot of work being published on an either, you know, based on post-structural, for structuralist theory. precisely looking at events happening in Libya and Egypt and Tunisia as this kind of, you know, messianic moment. I mean, Los Urdo has a beautiful critique of this kind of work where he basically says, you know, looking at revolutions as something that is, you know, it's coming and this idea that we're going to all be liberated. And so there was really like this projection towards the events in the Arab world.

Now, in the process of, you know, of analysis, what the event became, what everyday became for me, it's history. It's basically the power of history, you know, and when you're looking at history, you are from an everyday perspective and what people are telling you, what was happening and so on and so forth, you realize that you need to have a dialectically, dialectic, you need to establish a dialectical relationship between the everyday, actions of people and the structures under which these actions take place, because otherwise you're left with individual agency, which, again, it's very unhelpful, but it was very mainstream when I was writing this. So the dialectical relationship is precisely the necessity to understand that social phenomena are taking place under a structure. Now, that structure, it's a geopolitical structure, it's a hierarchical structure. And when you look at the Arab world,

you can not consider that there is a geopolitical structure under which the Arab world is integrated and that, you know, as an impact at every level of society. And this is what then the book becomes about, showing that the everyday, at every point in time, cannot be disconnected with these major changes that were happening at the structural level. And there is a constant dialectical approach,

even in the sense that trying to understand how one was influencing the other, what were the space of maneuvers that the Libyan government had, that people thought had in their lives, as well as the spaces of discipline and control, which now we call obviously imperialism, that the geopolitical structure

was imposing on Libya. Yeah, fascinating. That's a very methodologically rich to understand that approach to uncovering the dialectical dimensions of these processes. But I wanted to come back actually to something about the sources

and methods of the study itself. This study, because of certain constraints and limitations, relies quite a lot on oral history, on interviews, and on developing relationships with people that you could speak to about the pre-2011 period who were outside of Libya. And so I wanted to ask a little bit about what some of the challenges are or were of doing oral histories like this. you talk quite in a very sophisticated and I think very open and direct way about these challenges. So you're not just sort of trying to represent, well, I did these interviews and now I'm going to tell you about what I found as the researcher and how I'm putting it together.

You're very clear about some of these dialectics, you might say, of the research process and what was foreclosed and what was opened up by, by this dynamic relationship. So I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a texture. How did you go about making these kind of contacts? And what did you have to keep in mind in attempting to create an appropriate dynamic to be able to understand something about the everyday conditions of Libya pre-2011? Yeah, you see, the book basically starts from a hole. That whole was the literature view. Basically, what I found scholarly being written on Libya.

And what I had found scholarly being written on Libya was this, what I call the triptych, the tropes, that, you know, they were really used to describe academically and how it's fascinating because I moved to archival research and I can see that the CIA used to say exactly the same thing. But, you know, anyway. What we're seeing is that there was a frame. The frame told us, I'm not going to go into detail now, but, you know, the idea was there is a stateless society, so there is no state. And this was a strobe that goes back not just to the Jammarria period, goes back to the Ottoman Libya. So from Ottoman Libya, and then the Jammaria is a prime example of our never state has been able to function and to, you know, to materialize in the country. That's one. Two, authoritarianism, what we're talking about before, personification of the government into one man, the idea that is repressive, and then it's done to severe the relationship between the people and the government.

By doing that, and we're seeing this all on and on, what you do is that you create the conditions to, we need to remove Gaddafi so that the people will be free. That's political. I mean, you know. The third one was the idea of rogue state, which was also connected to renter state. So Libya is based on oil. The oil revenues are in the hands of a crazy one man who's ruling over the society. There is no state, so there is basically no structure of, you know, of control and anything. He's going to want to use these revenues to do what?

International terrorism. That's a quick equation that here easily you could be drawn. out from the, from the literature. And it kept, and it keeps repeating on and on, on. That's it. You find. So then you had 2011 in the back of my head and all this romanticization from, to which, I mean, I had been affected by. I cannot say I wasn't. You know, in the sense, all this protests and so on and so forth. So I'm looking, where are the people here? That was my question. The people have been missing. Nobody wanted to interact with what, you know, what did they actually, what were they actually saying?

So that's where the methodological clue comes in, which was, let's try to interview people. Let's try to talk to Libyans. What do they think about what happened? So oral history. Now, the problem is, and I am going to explain this, I'm going to talking about basically, because I realized all these different things by going into so-called, you know, doing the interview, what they call going to the field, whatever, and so on and so forth. First, the country was destroyed.

I couldn't go to Libya. Second, talking about the past, especially about the Jamiya past, meant you really want to put yourself into trouble. And this is the time when I was doing the interview where, you know, ISIS had come up in certain they were butchering people. So, how are we going to do this? We're going to interview people who left Libya after 2011. because my research was about the past. It wasn't about the present. But that was really, you know, like that was the naive PhD student.

You're not doing a research about the past. You can't. Why? Because when I started talking about the research, it didn't matter what. To have an opinion about the past, you needed to position yourself vis-à-vis the present. And that meant what?

It meant that when I was asking about, Oh, Libya, I was life before 2011. And that's why, you know, it's the order of the book, it's the other way around. But the chapter that comes at last, it's actually what I found right away, a heavily divided society, this idea of, you know, Jordan and Tahalib and, you know, facing one another. Because that's what I found. What I found was, we are against the regime or NATO has destroyed us. And from there, once I understood what I was facing, then I also realized that I needed to start from the present directly. And so my questions changed, and I began asking, what did you think happened in 2011?

And that was a game changer for me. Because once you ask about their opinion about 2011, then you can retrospectively start going back. And all of a sudden, you realize that many of the things they were talking about, about, they were, they had a shared ground, a common ground, because, you know, they lead through it. So this goes back to dialectical materialism. Why? Because I was having interviews. This is this course. This is narratives now. You need to insert words into dominant structures, which are material structures. And so what, when you talk to someone, you do, you're not talking about truth. This is not they're not going to tell you, you know, there were sometimes stories that had nothing to do with

reality, but they had actually everything to do with reality once they, once they were inserted in the political dynamics and the structure of the present and the material structure that I was trying to understand. So, in this process, I mean, first I realized anyway the violence, right away I realized the violence, because I found the society completely split, in, if you want to call it, in a diasporic space. They weren't even in Libya. So violence was right away, right there. And then the whole question of truth and objectivity

and the need to understand power structure, material structure, not just power structure, material structure. You need to insert these narratives of the everyday within bigger dynamics. Yeah, just to follow up on, you know, positioning yourself. So one of the things that I think interesting, and I'm just going to put this as a passing note before I get to the actual question.

You're talking about interviewing diasporic Libyans. It just makes me think about my positionality within Russia. So I know that when people in the West primarily hear discourse from Russians, the discourse is driven by the fact that the Russians that they're hearing from are platformed by Western media, and they are people who have left the country for one reason or another. but they are positioned in a way on the media as if their voices are representative of Russians per se or at least one major strand of Russian thought, whereas, you know, I've had experiences with diasporic Russians and I've had a lot of experiences considering I live here with Russians in Russia.

And I can tell you that the average Russian in Russia has very different thoughts about a multitude of events, situations, ideology, then the average diasporoid does. And in addition to that, you know, when people aren't having necessarily everyday conversations, even with diasporic, and again, in my case, specifically Russians, what they're hearing is diasporic Russians that Western media finds to be particularly useful for the project that they're pushing. So like, you're even farther removed from the average opinion from the average Russian in Russia. But anyway, an aside and you don't have to address that if you don't want Mateo. It's just something that, you know, comes to my mind as we're thinking about being, having people in the diaspora accessible to you, right? You know, like that is something that has to be considered vis-a-vis what the actual situation and the everyday politics is within the country. But speaking of, you know, your positionality, one of the things that you talk about quite amusingly, as a matter of fact, and if I remember correctly, chapter two of the book, is your position as a Western academic and specifically an Italian academic,

given the colonial history of Italy and Libya. And one of the things that you point out is that even when you are trying to convince these Libyans that you're interviewing, that, no, I'm a researcher, I'm an anti-imperialist research, or I'm an anti-colonialist research, and I'm like really looking for your perspective and your reality of this situation. The first thing that comes to mind for most of these are, well, he must be a state intelligence asset. And so I'm curious if you can talk to us a little bit about your experiences of being an Italian Western researcher, trying to interview people from a former colony of your country and how that relationship then colors the way that you are able to interact with most of the people you are reaching out to. and then how it colors the interactions you have

with the people that actually do agree to consent to these interviews with you. Thanks, Andrew. They're really profound, you know, like, reflections. You know why? Because I want to address what you said first about the diasporic space and the diaspora. You know why?

Because there is a book that it's called Arab Spring abroad. And it does exactly what I've done, but it reaches completely different conclusions. And from the cover, it's a Libyan flag with the White House in the back. So the new, the revolutionary Libyan flag with the White House in the back of it. Now, this is, we go back to the famous positionality and really the necessity of the dialectical approach compared to identity politics. which can be easily manipulated according to, oh, who is the right diasporic Libyan you've been talking to?

Why aren't the ones that they were identifying themselves and they considered the Libyan government legitimate being given a voice, whereas those who perhaps, as I'm going to be talking about, I didn't meet in Manchester, but I wanted to, are always given priority to speak. So, I mean, this is important. Why? Because the first thing that I noticed,

and I didn't approach this as I knew I was going to, this was going to happen. The first thing I found by, you know, starting trying to connect with people, I didn't know, you know, you always have a so-called galekeeper and then gets a ball rolling. He puts you in touch with people,

say, oh, I'm going to put you in touch with one, two, three of my friends, and then you can talk to them about your research. Well, the first thing that keeps coming back on and on, on and on, is the fact that people are trying to avoid me. And again, I'm like, you know, we have a revolution. This is democracy. This is freedom. I'm not joking. This is exactly what I was thinking.

So if this is, you know, if the authoritarian regime is gone, why is people afraid to speak to me? So perhaps I've been thinking about differently, about, you know, maybe I am Italian, but then maybe because it's because I am a foreigner, maybe I'm asking too intrusive questions about the past, I don't know. But then, I mean, obviously guided by some of my Libyan friends, I realize that, listen, people think you are from the intelligence.

They are afraid of you. They think you are an agent. And you see, it's precisely, this is what I say, that materialism, in a way, for me, came precisely out of praxis. This is the praxis that eventually made me change the analysis, which means it changed the theory used to explain things. Because I started wanting to look for resistance, guys. Whereas what I found was fear, something that I couldn't understand,

and the necessity to rethink the concept that I had in mind. So dialectical materialism started directly from the way I was doing research, not because I wanted to impose a Marxist analysis on this. It was necessary to understand what was happening here. You need to dialectically understand and reach and change the concepts according to what the practice is telling you. So violence, let's start from there, and fear. I could have easily gone into authoritarianism and say,

all everything that happened here, it's a sort of Gaddafi. Gaddafi this, Gaddafi that. And that's when you say you pick up a think tank book, a book, sorry, that's a bit too much. But an analysis, that's what they're going to tell you. Libya is in the state because of 40 years of dictatorship. But then why aren't they not talking to a Western guy who supposedly has helped them, you know, in 2011 to liberate the country? And that's where you need to start going back to the material structure in which Libya was inserted. Why? Because if they are thinking you are an agent, if they are thinking that they cannot trust you,

where does this distrust of the West? It comes from. You need to understand that too. And when you start looking at the history of Libya, it's pretty easy to find out that the country has been disciplined for, so long since the start of the revolution in 1969, through gunboat diplomacy, funding of the opposition, actual bombings, sanctions, and eventually 2011. So how can you discount this major material history from any analysis of Libya and the everyday per se? Because it's not that it's the people themselves talking about something that makes you realize that you You need to go back and connect dialectly the whole. You need to create the totality of the social relations.

You can just speak and choose the social relations as you want. And from there, I see also, I start to seeing, you know, the so-called degrees of fear and surveillance. Because some people didn't want to talk to me because they feared I was an agent. But some other people didn't want to talk to me because I didn't want to talk to me because I, They did fear to reveal themselves, like, for example, when I went to Manchester. That was amazing to me. Because in Manchester, there is a huge Libyan community. In some of them exile, it's historical.

It goes back to many of them that left the country, especially after the revolution in 69, and they established different Islamist groups. And that's where I had the most fascinating, you know, encounter with this surveillance. Because they literally avoided me. I spent 15, you know, two weeks there, and I haven't been able to meet with anybody until someone talked to me and it was like, well, you know, these people were directly brought in 2011

by the UK for the revolution. And probably now they don't want to reveal themselves. So that's, I would guess, the way they're not talking to you. You know, I could have celebrated them as heroes and resistance. But, you know, we can't just speak and choose. You need to look at reality. And reality is telling us that something else is happening here. And so we change methodologically.

This is, you know, considering what we're talking about, this is precisely the need to have a dialectical relationship between practice and theory, even for a researcher when he comes down to it. This is a perfect transition since you're talking about surveillance and these religiously oriented resistance movements that found, you know, Haven in the West to talk a little bit about the chapter. It's quite very interesting because at the same time, you're not, you know, you are telling us the stories of certain kinds of repression that people felt and the way in which surveillance worked in this society during a period under the sanctions,

under the extreme pressure that the Libyan state was under during, you know, the pre-2011 period after the Locker B, you know, bombing sanctions and pressure and various things, that there was a kind of surveillance in the society about religiosity, because there is this longstanding policy where, religious movements have been promoted as, you know, counterweights or ways of undermining and disturbing the integrity of the secular kind of leftist, socialistically oriented regimes in the Middle East for decades. And yet, I think you also at the same time gave some serious consideration to the way in which this was a kind of repressive social environment that was created

because of these policies that highlighted for me that there's a very complex story to talk about religion and religious movements in the Middle East. Sometimes it's clear that they are, you know, tools of imperialism, and other times they are some of the actual everyday modes by which people are resisting, repressive regimes, often as well, Western-supported regimes, so that you have on the one hand, you know, and this is what, you know, maybe doesn't make sense to people, so I'm hoping you can help clarify and analyze this both within the Libyan context that you've studied so carefully with the texture of these stories and experiences and that larger geopolitical manipulation or role because, you know, people are confused, you know, you have a,

you know, the first democratic regime in Egypt's history is a Muslim Brotherhood dominated party and it is immediately shut down with Western support. And yet, on the other hand, we have a whole global war on terrorism supposedly to stop these, you know, kind of jihadist groups. And yet, you know, somehow when the United States announces that it's got a problem with Gaddafi, it's got a problem with Assad, somehow we see all of a sudden the emergence of well-armed and financed, you know, religiously motivated, religiously based groups. So perhaps you can tell us something about how you tried to understand what the meaning of this kind of religiosity and how it was sometimes repressed and what its meaning was in the Libyan context before 20 that of course helps us explain and understand what happened in 2011 and also the kind of broader geopolitics of Islamist movements in the Middle East. Well, the history of Libya, I mean, of the Jamiria is inerently connected, obviously,

to the, I mean, again, the idea is that there is a totality of social relations in which these events are taking place. So we can discount one element of the other. history of the Libyan Arab Jamaria is the history of the gradual decline of Arabism, pan-Arabism, and socialism, the rise of the unipolar moment of imperialism, and the consolidation of the reactionary elements within the Arab region, the monarchies of the Gulf, and a certain vision of Islam, the Wahhabi vision of Islam. So, historically, what we see, happening in Libya is precisely the everyday, it's, you know, it literally, it's, it's,

you're not superimposing. You're seeing exactly that it emanates, it emerges directly from the everyday, this dynamic. Why? Because what you're seeing is that, you know, we're not going to go into the, into the details of the revolution, but at the beginning, there is idea that the, the, the Libyan Arab Jamirian needs to be a socialist, secular revolution. And, you know, Islam needs to be put on the side. Now, for example, in the reconstruction of the archives of Libya that have been trying to do in the past

years, when you look at some ideological or revolutionary journal, you see that Islam's by the 80s and late 80s comes back into the theoretical production of the government, because they need to start handling with Islam in a

different way and they cannot completely lose this dimension in their revolutionary ideology. but by that time and especially by the 90s, Libya is under sanctions. Now, this is important because the dynamic of fear and surveillance that the book, you know, traces at the level of the everyday, is directly related to the material structure under which Libya, the international structure in which Libya was. Why? Because this trust and surveillance and violence were key elements describing key characteristic, describing the nature of the

relationship that Libya had vis-a-vis the so-called Western liberal law. On the basis of unproved false flag attacks, and, you know, I'm talking about Lockerbie, I'm talking about the Label discotheque bombing that Libya was accused of, and on the basis of that Ronald Reagan bombed Libya twice in Begasian, Tripoli. And then there was Lockerbie as well, on the basis of which, you know, more than two decades, no more, about two decades of sanctions almost were allowed to be imposed on Libya. So on the basis of this constant use of fear that blurs the and creates this picture of a terrorist regime that we need to control and we distrust, then we create the machines needed, the tools needed to control Libya.

And this is where we see slowly, because again, it's material, the whole process. The moment the regime comes under, the Libyan government comes under all this pressure, material policy starts to reverse. So what was progressive at the beginning starts, you know, like this. If there was a land reform, if there was all nationalization, if there was, you know, construction of infrastructure for the people, the regime is not able anymore to provide for the people as it used to

under the weight of these sanctions. Under the weight of these sanctions, it's normal to take place. The people are not happy. Why are we under sanctions? Why are we? And that's where you start funding also the opposition

and you create collective groups that can actually how do you say rebel against the Libyan state and produce a coup in your favor. And this is where how we connect the funding and the emergence of religious groups inside Libya, like the Libyan

Islamic Fighting Group, Palbu Qatila, and others, like the ones based in Manchester. And the response of the regime to the awareness that these groups are being funded. they are there and they are dangerous but also an excessive response at times of the regime because as much as the line is blurred

between Libya and the West Libya is also looking at his own nation and his own people and is trying to control the situation under this pressure one could say you know are we justifying all these measures here Is this really... But guess what?

And Henry, this is for you. Well, you know where I really understood what was happening? By reading the literature on all this bloody surveillance on the ex-counties of the Soviet Union, especially Romania. I had to go back there and I started seeing it there, you go. What is happening here? Because you could go and say, oh, this is dictatorial. They are looking at everything people they are doing and so on and so forth.

The country is under sanctions. Opposition groups are being funded. Defense becomes a material object, a goal, which eventually also affects the material policies of the regime itself. They start, you know, sidelining consumption, and they want the production of weapons instead. You see this with North Korea as well, which is always depicted as a dictatorship, and then you talk about Songgun as this concept, you know, the primacy of the military because we need to defend ourselves. We are under attack. There is, these are the laws of development that we need to understand, not just romanticizing history. I'm sorry, guys. I don't know if I replied.

No, no, that was great. It's very important that we always consider the material conditions. And especially if you're talking about a difference in power relations, the smaller countries that are being imposed upon by imperialist countries, They have a dramatically different set of material conditions than people that are in the West can typically conceive of. And that's just, it's just the reality that think about the surveillance and repression, but the United States implemented after 9-11. I mean, not that it wasn't already in place before 9-11, but think about how that surveillance infrastructure and architecture was really mobilized and imposed upon the populace after 9-11. We're talking about the greatest imperialist country in the world imposing this repressive surveillance infrastructure and architecture upon its own populace as a result of not even a state group. We're talking about a non-state entity, hijacking a few planes, causing, you know, 3,000 people died. Obviously, that is quite horrific and quite terrible.

But that is the reality that the United States was facing. And as you put it, Matteo, thinking about some of these former. Soviet countries, or if we're looking at Libya, looking at the sanctions regimes that are put on them, and listeners who haven't gone back into our back catalog, we have the sanctions as war series that we ran over the course of about a year with about, what, 15 episodes Adnan in the series or so, something like that, case studies, theoretical episodes. So, you know, thinking about sanctions is something that we've done a lot on this show. But then also, as you pointed out, funding of opposition groups, doing all of these subversive

things, rigging elections. You know, this is something that happens kind of in the open in some cases. The United States always likes to complain. Ah, these countries are rigging their own elections, or they're trying to rig our elections. The United States openly rigged

the election in favor of Yeltsin, again, using the example of Russia, just because I live here. But when I say openly, they literally put it on the cover of Time Magazine. They put a picture of Yeltsin, and the title of that issue was the man, the United States elected. And it was a picture of Yeltsin. You know, like, that was very in the open.

Now, these countries that don't have the resources that the United States do, obviously they are going to put together different repressive structures that they believe are necessary in order to preserve the society that they're in because of this imperial domination and pressure that they are facing externally. You know, that's just the reality. So I really appreciate that you highlighted that, Mateo, it's something that people in the West typically fail to see because they are living in the imperial core. They don't think about the reality of imperialist countries constantly having this sort of pressure on them. It's not a point of time. It is an architecture of, you know, imperialism that is in place and being imposed upon these countries. But one of the

things I wanted to follow up on, Mateo, you started to touch upon how things were really changing in the late 80s. And you could really think of this in terms of there being two phases of the Jamaria. You could think of it as from the late 60s to the late 80s and then from the late 80s until 2011. And of course, you can obviously break these down into smaller and smaller pieces to look more specifically at smaller periods of time. But really, I think that thinking of it in terms of these two main phases is quite important. So here's a two-part question for you. The first part of this question is, you know, you already touched on it a little bit, but can you discuss a little bit why we would divide this history into these two periods? What were the things that were

distinct between these two periods? Not only the things that caused there to be this split, but what were the effects of this historic split within the Jamaria. But then also, and this is perhaps harder to answer, you know, you are talking about collecting oral histories and you're collecting oral histories after that split happens. And so I'm curious what your experience was in interviewing people, you know, much, much later than this split happened. How did the people understand this split? How did the people perceive this two phases of the country? And whether or not they were aware that likely their experience in the second phase was also coloring their

perspective of the first phase as well. You know, obviously we're not saying like, oh, you live through the second phase and therefore you have no insights as to the first phase because your perspective is entirely colored. But I'm curious of whether these people were aware that, well, you know, I did live through this. And so therefore, I am going to have a perspective that is being colored by a different historical moment as to my experience in this prior moment. So like I said, that second part is a little bit tougher because I'm asking you to

get in the heads of people that you were interviewing. But feel free to take it however you want, Mateo. No, it's actually a beautiful question, but I get there. Let's give the, again, the totality of the social relations, which means this passage of what you call the first and the second question, and the second phase. I know we're going to be talking about more about this. But to be brief, you have a revolution in 1969, Al-Fata, the opening,

It's a revolution who takes place through a bloodless military coup whose codename was Jerusalem, you know, precisely because the Palestinian question was central during the time of Panarapism. Now, as, you know, you guys know, I don't have to say this

and I'll be brief, but any kind of, we are at in the aftermath of Second World War, we're seeing a whole period, a long duration of colonization taking place. The principles that Libya is incarnating in that moment, the mode of consciousness that is trying to develop, it really, like, connects to that historical period. You have national liberation,

regional solidarity, and the necessity to undo the international order, meaning anti-imperiodism. So we're going to get to a national, We're going to get our national independence if we establish a strategy of regional solidarity because imperialism is clobbering us. And you see this happen.

Everything is done. These are the laws of development. It's not like, there is nothing, you know, this. If we, this, you know, if you pick up any book, they will tell you it was Gaddafi, it was crazy. Or, you know, it's trying to do this, they introduce this policy. But if you understand.

History, that's the motor, the engine that was taking place at that time. So, national liberation translates into land reform, closure of foreign military bases, or nationalization, construction of infrastructure for the people. Yet, this is not enough. Why? Because we also need to support our regional hundreds, our regional, you know, social formations that are also trying to achieve. that path. And so there is a lot of funding and

establishment of ideological centers, creation, you know, military and logistical training to different groups in the region. Now, Libya is part of the Arab region. And the Arab region had a specific strategy in order to delink, we could say, using some of it from that structure. And that was Arab socialism, which I'm sure you've talked to with

Ali Qadri as well. So the idea was you know, we are under imperialism. There is a centrality to Israel, not because they are Jewish, but because we know exactly Israel is central to U.S. imperialism, so Palestine becomes central for us. And Palestine became central to the Jammari as well, because they were funding numerous groups in order to fight against the Zionist colonization.

In this period, so what you're seeing is precisely these three different, you know, and then you have like Thomas Sankara is funded, you know, there is a connection with the, with all kinds of different groups here in this period. But in this process, what's important is that there isn't like a playbook, you know, that it tells us we're going to get to anti-imperialism, national liberation, regional solidite in this way. Each country tried its own path.

And in that pratt, you know, I like the word zigzagging because that was an experiment and they were really trying to, you know, to find a way. And in the process, Libya also makes, it's easy to look back and say makes mistake, but it takes actions that probably led also to a quagmire like the war in Chad. Libya decides to intervene in Chad supporting a certain rebel groups, which was anti-French control. But Libya probably didn't really, couldn't know at that time that the entire West was going to get into Chad and fight back this movement and Libya itself. And in the clout of the unipolar moment that was taking place, Libya is military.

defeated in Chad. It is because whereas Libya had managed to control the country, Jamena and the capital, then he needs to withdraw slowly and eventually settles everything at the International Criminal Court.

Court of Justice. Now, why this is important? It's important because as you take different steps throughout this strategic plan of reaching national liberation, regional solidarity and anti-imperialist, you know, an undoing of the unequal dynamics that

characterize the international order in which you're part of, you can be defeated. And if you are defeated militarily, then this is going to translate also in the way the ideas used to think of reality change. And again, we go back to praxis and theory. We see the dialectical relationship. If I am losing, if I am being defeated, inevitably I'm going to start to rethink the use of the revolution becomes anachronistic. Why are we doing this? Why are we under sanctions? We are losing here. And that's what happened. And that's how we start gradually entering in the second phase. A second phase where the elites themselves, the ruling class, they start thinking of

Libya of the revolution and this anti-imperialist revolution being more and more anachronistic why are we under sanctions our people is being clobbered we need to open up our country and that's where the reverse starts

I mean it's not one day things change it's slowly it's a progressive you know it's a gradual transformation in which you see Libya moving from socialist

policies on an economic level you know anti-colonial support and then eventually moving to let's open up the country we need to reconcile with the West we need to find different ways

to interact with the international order but there are degrees of also you know Libya never went all the way like Egypt who signed a normalization agreement with Israel Libya didn't open up the country as brutally as if G. Egypt did. So there are degrees in the way we, you know,

historicize and present these two phases. But that's what happens. And in that process, your question is important. Why? Because if you haven't lived the first part of the first space and you are just, you know, you basically grew up during the second phase, you are growing up in a face of defeat. of the so-called public sector is not functioning. Why do we even have a public sector anymore? And this is Italy right now. I mean, you don't need to go back to Libya.

The public sector is not working, okay? So the idea is that the present influences the past. This is not working. Why? Because the guy was crazy. He wanted to take up the entire West. So you do rethink the past in relation to the present. But in this process, we can't forget about the future, because that's where then it is the ambition to reach something different that drives also the temporal dimension of this.

And that's where the ambitions and the hopes come in. You know, look, we cannot access goods because of our crazy policies that we had. We need to look at the West. We need to try to transform Libya into a different country. And that's, you know, chapter four, which I'm sure you know, the idea of Dubai. and so on. I was going to ask that question then regarding Dubai, but I guess before we talk about Dubai, you know, I'm just curious about that part about perspectives of people and whether or not, you know, thinking about this afterwards is really coloring their view of the

whole, the whole era rather than, you know, this clear differentiation between these two periods in their mind. No, no, it is. It is absolutely. It is coloring. I mean, but it's more than coloring. I I think it's precisely that, you know, that gradual passage of time that, you know, I was describing the fact that according to where, if you were able to live in a certain era, and you are now looking back differently to that, but also you're not just looking back and rethinking the past according to the present. It's also, you know, this ambition and drive towards the future. The model is we want to be like Dubai, for example. But at the same time, and this is where also we, you know, NATO, this is where NATO cannot be discounted for a second. All this interview had to deal with a huge amount of violence, which was epistemological, intellectual, material. You know, when you were talking, you were inserting yourself in a reality that was very violent.

So even about talking about the past in a slightly critical way or, you know, like saying something about the previous government in a nice way, that was a betrayal of what was happening now, because a new political economy is set and you have to now locate yourself in this very violent present. Yeah. You alluded to the discussion. that you have in a very substantial and important chapter four about oil, consumerism, and capitalist modernity in your previous response. And it's something I definitely wanted to explore because I was thinking myself that one of the key dimensions of dissatisfaction among certain groupings within society must crystallize around this kind of simplistic idea that, well, we have oil, why are we not like the Gulf states? And envisioning that as the way to be a modern, successful country that seems to have crystallized in the period after the

social gains of redistribution were no longer possible because of that period of extreme external geopolitical pressure that prevented the state from having a access to the same kinds of oil resources that in the revolutionary period and continuing in the Jemahiriyah period were, you know, socialized. So people start to think of themselves as poor. They start to experience, you know, poverty because it's enforced on them. And they think of themselves as poor because they don't necessarily understand and analyze the dynamics by which any future has been prevented for them. And they think, well, if we just got rid of our government, we could be like the Emirates or we could be like Kuwait.

And so I wanted you to talk a little bit more about what you found and how you analyzed these discourses about the so-called problem of oil that we also see in development economics discourses. Somehow it's the worst thing in the world to be a country that has remarkably big natural resources without saying, well, the reason why is because you're subject to a global economy that prevents you from actually using them to invest in your own society and develop. So can you tell us what you found in this very important and fascinating chapter and how you explain and understand the differences, you know, between that revolutionary period where it seemed like maybe a cap, you know, oil was going to create a socialist. modernity. That was the hope, how that was derailed. And what's important about this discourse that you saw in consumerist comparisons with the Gulf countries by Libyans? Yeah, I mean, I think this was, it is, it is one of the chapters that really gets down the most to the material conditions in a way.

But at the same time, I was very fascinated by the ways in which the materiality of life, you know, affects inevitably the way you think about your future. And, you know, like the projection of the desires, what I want, what I hope for. Yeah, I mean, what we see during this time is that Libya is under a material war, a geopolitical war, who has his own consequences, his own influence is also an intellectual level, because it's also an intellectual war. You clobber, you sanction the country, not just because you don't want them to gain the material means, but you also want to make sure that you delegitimize that government in the face of its own people. So there is, you know, it's a total warfare in that case. You're trying to break the relationship because, you know, look, they're sanctioning this government.

I, you know, why are we even pursuing these ideas? Maybe it's time for us to step back and look at other countries that are more successful. So the story goes, according to the mainstream literature, as we said before, that oil is a curse. You know, we have so much oil revenues, a madman, a crazy man ruling like a one-man show, you know, he wants to do all these things and the people are suffering. And by the way, I wrote an article where, you know, by pure chance, but I started reading the literature from Venezuela and you see exactly the same thing repeating. So it's very fascinating how this is recreated over and over. In fact, there are books actually where they compare Iran, Venezuela and Libya, not in the way I do, but in the

other way showing this kind of variable of oil that is destroying countries across different parts of the global south for the same reasons. The story is that nobody obviously asks the questions, why is the US so dependent on oil, but manages not to be so cursed, although we might see a different story soon. But that's something else. Well, there's, there's so lucky to, you know, have developed a military industrial complex because that's the only other part of the economy. Exactly. So basically, what you're seeing is that Libya, the story of oil and Libya and the changes in the material conditions has to do also with, again, what we were talking about before, the collapse of the Soviet Union

and the and and the consolidation of the U.S. financial dominance through the political control also of oil act, of oil in the region of the Middle East, by, you know, basically trading political security, military and political security with, to Saudi Arabia in exchange of Saudi Arabia switching the oil. you know, switching the oil production constantly, the U.S. was able really to destroy the countries, first with a glitz in the 1980s, not just of Libya, but of different African countries that during that time they were trying to pursue a different, you know, model of development, developmental path. And the countries that are affected the most, obviously, it's going to be the USSR, which eventually collapsed then Libya and others like Iran, although then, you know, the discussion is bigger. Some of them managed to withstand for different reasons. What happens with Libya in any case is that it also managed to withstand. If we think about it along Durae, Libya arrived to 2011,

you needed a NATO intervention. So Libya withstood the sanctions to a certain extent. What the problem is, is that this intellectual war that follows the material war, as Fidel Castro used to say, the guns follow the ideas and the ideas follow the guns. It's very important because you are seeing what, that there is an abandonment of progressive policies by the government under the weight of sanctions first, the US unilateral sanction and then UN multilateral sanctions, starting from 1992 up to 2003. During this period, what you see is that people start imagining

a different world, a different way of having a life. And so, and they do so, not at the level of, because again, we have to make this distinction of degrees, not at the level of Egypt, where you have this huge poverty of the people, and nonetheless, you still have a, you know, a military regime in power. Libya didn't look like that. You had certain scarcity, difficulties to access goods, but these same goods then become, you know, They assume a positional and symbolic value. And I talk about this in the book where I talk about bananas and chewing gums where really people start to picking up on them. And they assume this, you know, like onyric meaning in their lives.

Like we want, you know, chewing them and banana takes us to a different like dimension spatially and also materially. Why? Because, I mean, sanctions is not just about the. material scarcity is also about the international isolation. So this commodities really become a way to travel in your mind, to reach somewhere else. What happens during this period then is that by the time Libya starts to withstand the sanctions on the one hand, but the socioeconomic conditions deteriorate for a good part of the population, a ruling, part of the ruling elite emerges with a different

plan from Libya, which is clearly shown by the ways in which people were talking to me about Dubai, dreaming Dubai. So this idea is, you know, we have all this oil. Why don't we look like Dubai?

Why Dubai managed to thrive, to develop so much? And look at us. Infrastructures are gone. You know, we have to go abroad for health reasons. You know, it's like the wheel has been spinning the other way around. And that's where the contradictions obviously lies,

lies in the fact that there was not simply a split within the population. The split existed at the geopolitical level because, you know, the idea of socialist modernity had progressively been defeated. And at the level of the elites in Libya, who were the first ones not to agree on what path the country, needed to take. And that's why I trace this two different model of cert. In a way, Libya, you know, as some of my colleagues were reflecting through the, you know, through some of the ideas of the book, was even pioneering to a certain extent the idea of multipolarity,

because it starts to reach out to different countries and tries to revive the idea of African Union during that time, which was central for Libya to withstand the sanction. It was really central. At the same time, though, there is part of the elites that is very comfortable to do business with the West. And this is where, you know, it can't be just simply polarized in this way. We really have to see as a way also the government to try to, you know, to get out of the sanctions and to play nice with the West show that we're doing something, but also didn't, not really abandoning, but transforming the ideas that had led to the revolution back in 1969. And you really see the capacity of a government to work through the contradictions here

of reality and theoretically. Because when you look at this Almatabal Alamia, the World Center, which was this major revolutionary center of intellectual production, and time, it was very in time periods back in the 70s and the 80s. By the 1990s, late 1990s and early 21st, 2000, they are talking about we need to fight against globalization. It's not anymore imperialism. It's economic globalization now. So there is a change. But this change, obviously, when you look on the everyday, is reflected by how the people

much more simply think about the structures around them. They want a better life. We don't want this. But in doing so, obviously, they discount a whole range of factors. And, you know, the fact that the Gulf didn't ride. just because it had oil, but because it renounced to their national sovereignty in order to spare ahead a project of imperialism and abandoning the Palestinian question, which we are seeing it right now.

Absolutely. And more than that, it also needs to be said, is that when I referred before to the Arab Cold War, I mean, this is essentially what was at stake in the 50s and 60s, which was, you know, is there going to be a populist regional, Arab national kind of sense of polity and responsibly where there will be redistribution and there will be some kind of equality? Or are some small parts of the Middle East that were cut off by colonial and post-colonial geopolitics going to prevent resource redistribution in the whole region and just monopolized in the hands of a few undemocratic, you know, elites. And that's what has been fought over for the last

several generations and decades of Middle Eastern history. And so the idea that Libya could have been, you know, one of the Gulf kinds of countries would only have been possible if it wasn't something that had been there to benefit the vast majority of its people or to participate in progressive, you know, positive, you know, policies towards its region in Africa. And, you know, this is exactly what is occluded by this fantasy that, well, we could just be, you know, the analysis that you just gave is never present there. So I'm so glad that that's been part of this book. And I really appreciate that. And as you're pointing out, we're seeing the consequences of this today

is that the countries that demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians that stand up to and resist imperial geopolitical intervention in the region are made to be punished. They suffer sanctions. They suffer invasion. They suffer bombardment. So, of course, they can never develop to be safe, stable,

developed societies, they're prevented by imperialism. This is the analysis that's never presented in comparing, you know, what parts of the Middle East have suffered and which have been, you know, carved off into these havens of, you know, oil money. Absolutely. Yeah, so I have two final questions for this episode in the tale. I mean, there's a million things left on that I have notes from your book, but I want to save plenty of things for the the future conversation that we will be having with you. So the two final questions I have, one is a very small follow-up to something that you had said earlier

and then one will be in closing. And I'll start with the follow-up question. You mentioned chewing gum. This is something that I wanted to bring up. Specifically, you know, the listeners might be thinking that this mention of chewing gum is kind of a almost humorous aside. But actually, it's very interesting in the book,

you bring it up several times throughout the chapter that it's in. as this, you know, like, beacon of what, what could be possible. We could have, like, easy access to chewing gum, and the lack of easy access to it was, you know, I was representative of what the people were having to face more broadly within society at that time. But what I'm curious about Mateo, and, you know, if the listeners want a more full accounting of the chewing gum story, they should read the book. But I'm curious, because you mentioned it several times in that chapter, how present was chewing gum in your conversations with these people. Because, you know, as we're talking about,

the information for these sections are largely coming from these oral histories that you're collecting through interviews with people. And chewing gum is very present within that chapter. So I'm just curious as an aside, you know, how often are these Libyan people in the diaspora talking about chewing gum? Like, is that something that's really on the forefront of their mind when they're going into these conversations with you? Well, unfortunately, and part Partly, yes, and it wasn't just chewing gum. I could have talked about Taharis at some point, or could have talked, as I did, chocolate.

I didn't get into chocolate also, sodas. Sodas was another thing that was really very much present into this discussion. And honestly, this were the ideas or the material commodities that symbolize that, you know, they incarnated the dissatisfaction of the people, which is, again, we have to have the degrees. We're not talking about people living in the streets homeless. We're talking about the lack of certain type of commodities. Like chewing gum chocolate, bananas, you know, we can go back to Thomas Sankara talking about, you know, look at your food, look at your plate, and you understand how much imperialism controls you. It's like, you know, that's why I say that Libya also needs to be, you know, differentiated with countries like Egypt where poverty,

I was reaching really high levels where people couldn't eat the normality that we're thinking here is different. But most importantly I think I highlighted chewing gum in the book because by doing my research then I find out that Mansoor Bushnaf, a Libyan author

had actually written an entire book about chewing gum and I had no idea Al Al-Lqa which was like all right, what is this chewing gum and I'm starting leading this project this book and I'm like oh wow chewing gum it depicts a philosophical project.

It embodies aesthetics, you know, it's like everybody's talking about chewing them. So it was actually a thing. And it's this object, you know, really, this commodity that is so like, it's like, I mean, I'm, you know, Andrew, you know, talking about blue jeans in or rock and roll and leather jackets and this all idea of scarcity.

But it's a war. Ultimately, you can see that, you know, they think of scarcity and they look at a, what could be, and that's Dubai, but what they can't understand, you know, it's not that they can't understand, but because it's an intellectual war, that's what I was trying to say before. I am

delitimizing a model in the first place so that you don't hope that that's the way to move forward. And you look elsewhere, capitalist modernity. Yeah, and then as I get into the final question, I just want to bring up something that's kind of

tangentially related, but I know you've listened to the show, so you know, tangents are what I do here. So I apologize in advance, but you should have seen it coming. You mentioned Sankara and you mentioned, you know, the scarcity of these kind of small products that we don't put too much thought into. It just reminds me of something that has been in the news relatively recently. I mean, not in mainstream news, but in, you know, anti-imperialist news, we have in Burkina Faso, since you mentioned Sankara, the current leader, Ibrahim Trioi, has, announced that they are opening a canned fish factory, which, you know, this seems like something

rather small and has actually got quite, has gotten quite a bit of derision amongst the liberals online. Like, oh, look at all of these these tankies and these left wing crazies signifying like, you know, this canned fish factory is, once they have the factory opened, it's going to be revolution complete and they'll have achieved communism. Of course, nobody has actually said that. But, you know, liberals like to construct these narratives in their mind of what, you know, those of us on the fringes of the anti-imperialist far-left think. But really, if you think about it, something is insignificant seeming as a canned fish factory is huge. And I know I'm hyper aware of this as somebody who lives in a place where canned fish is a large part of the diet and somebody who consumes an inordinate amount of canned fish, including for breakfast at it this morning. So, you know, I am thinking about canned fish a lot, more than the average bear.

But the important thing here is that we're talking about food security and food sovereignty, and there is a difference between these two things. Food security means that you have access to sufficient amounts of food in order to survive with a decent quality of life. That is not the same thing as food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is having control of your food supply. and canned fish is a very, you know, again, I'm biased because I eat so much of it, but it's a very healthy, it's a very tasty, it's a good staple to have in your diet amongst grains, yeah? You know, like grains and canned fish is the basis for a pretty decent diet on not a huge amount of money. And Burkina Faso is a very, it's an immiscerated country, forcibly so for centuries.

The opening of a canned fish factory is not an indication that a revolution has been achieved, but it is a step in the way of food sovereignty, which is critical for a successful revolution. It is not an indication of a revolution. It is not the end point of a revolution, but it is a requirement. Food sovereignty is a requirement for a successful revolution. And so thinking about these staples, and, you know, they may be small things, and I know that we're not saying, like, chewing gum and chocolate are going to be staples that people are going to need to survive. But it is this, you know, these small things, they do mean something, even if we just kind of cast them aside. And liberals like to sneer and say, well, canned fish, you know, it's nothing.

So I just wanted to throw that out there as an aside. Feel free to address it as I asked this final question, Mateo, if you would like. But the final question is kind of just to take the totality of the conversation that we've had and is to say, can we reiterate the importance of considering the everyday, which is something that all too often even on this show, we don't look at the everyday nearly enough. And hopefully that's something that we can continue to rectify as we go forward with your book serving as a useful corrective in this way. Why is looking at the everyday politics as a dialectical partner to the event, as you put it, so critical? And is there anything else that you want the listeners to take away or that you really want to drive home on what the everyday in the Libyan context specifically and in the Jamaria specifically, how this everyday should help us understand what life was like in the Jamaria and how we should. view that period of the country's history. I have to start from Burkina Fas

because since you've been talking about that, just drove my mind crazy because I've been thinking about this a lot. And you know why? I've been thinking about the anti-imperialist legacy of Libya. The country is destroyed. But you know what is

the anti-imperialist legacy of Libya? This coup is happening in Western Central Africa. That's what, that's, I am I am, you know, I am 100% sure about this. Because first and foremost, these countries got nominal independence through monetary control of France, and they never really saw an anti-imperialist French revolution. And they looked up at Gaddafi, one, two,

and three, they had this wave of terrorism, and Al-Qaeda funded groups right after the destruction of Libya. So Burkina Faso and Niger and Mali and all these countries, they wouldn't have the military coup without the history of Libya and without the destruction of Libya. And I don't know why I'm getting all these balloons, but anyway Zoom is recording videos to the listeners are going to be very

confused, but there was like balloons that were flying up behind Mateo on the screen for some strange reason. Anyway, Mateo, I think you ignore them. The universe came through into Zoom with profound approbation of that analysis, that point that you just made about the

connection between Libya, these West African revolutionary movements. So that's why I'm critical. No, but and that's important. And, you know, and the other point that you made me think, which, you know, to be like, again, the lesson of Domenico Lus Turo, that we still need to remain critical, even of our own movements, that Libya had limitations. And one of them was the incapacity to build, you know, that food sovereignty that you're talking about. The reliance of oil, that was a problem.

They tried, but again, we're talking about strategy that were developed. There was a strong debate that I'm now tracing into the other documents and archives. But that was central, and that was one of the things that sanctions heightened as well. On the every day, I think that, you know, we can't live in the world of geopolitics. Well, no, we can't really like decide what China is going to do or Russia is going to do. We live. Our life is our reality. But I think that the lesson for me, and I hope that those who read will possibly get, you know, a similar kind of lesson is that the everyday is a central space for us to think about the world.

If you're not able to think through the everyday, and you just want to theorize about, you know, big geopolitics and something, you know, off with you because you are not connected with the reality, with the material reality around you. And that's the first dimension that you face. You know, it's inevitable. So the everyday can be, if spoiled of this romantic obsession, liberal obsession, with agency, then you can see that the every day is the first really level in which revolutionary politics and thinking can come in. They have to come in because, you know, the reality is really contradictory at that level. And it's hard, it's hard. It's also a very, it's also a place where it's difficult to unpack everything and you cannot have the

arrogance to link all the time every single aspects to it, especially when it comes to the every day. But for me, the most important part is being that an understanding of the material reality of the quotidian, it means a direct connection with history.

And once you understand that your reality is material and historical, you are moving forward towards a path that some people have called back in the 18th century, you know, Marxism. But you know, we don't have to use the same language all the time.

Yeah, really great, you know, exposition and a tremendous conversation. I'm certainly looking forward to the discussion of the revolution in Libya and with you alongside your Libyan comrade that we're going to be having as part of our upcoming African Revolution and Decolonization series. So listeners, be sure to start getting hyped for that, let people know that that's going to be coming because it will be coming your way relatively soon. So stay tuned, make sure that you're subscribed to not miss that. Mateo, it's been an absolute tremendous pleasure to discuss this book with you, and I'm really looking forward to future conversations. Can you let the

listeners know how they can find your book and where they can find more of your work in your online presence? Adnan, Henry, thank you so much for this very refreshing conversation. We live in, you know, in a world of NATO and liberalism. So the opportunity to have deep and profound discussion about the possibility and the experiences of material experiences of places that tried and countries that tried a different developmental path is really refreshing for me. So I want to thank you both for this and for the work you do. The book is available on, it was published by Syracuse University Press. So it's available on their website, indeed, and everybody can find it there. If you just Google my name, you can find some articles around as well,

one of which is this beautiful special issue on imperialism on the Middle East, which we did. I co-edited with Adel Khadry, so that was, you know, really something that we're proud of, and we hope to advance the journal Middle East Critique in a certain direction, especially on the basis of that special issue. You know, for the rest, I am escalated, my online presence as much as the Zionists are escalating their own one in Palestine.

I wish I wouldn't have to do that, but we must all of us be there. So if anybody wants an analysis that connects Palestine and imperialism, you can find me on Twitter as well with Kappasomat and, you know, it's not about me anyway. It's, we are in this all together. So, Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast? Well, first, I just want to say how much I've enjoyed getting to know Mateo, a wonderful conversation. And it is a fantastic book. We didn't get into, you know, all of the details. We looked more at the sources and conceptualization. But it is extremely well written. And because it's based on accounts of people's experiences, there's just a wonderful texture that gives you a sense of daily realities, how people, people saw their experiences. It's wonderful. I encourage you to buy it and to read it. But listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you should check out

the M-A-J-L-I-S, my other podcast that has infrequent, but, you know, hopefully more frequent upcoming episodes on the Middle East Islamic World. And we hope maybe we'll have Mateo on as a guest sometime in the near future. So listeners, do check it out. Yeah, absolutely highly recommend that everybody do that. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995, since Mateo referenced Lacerdo a couple times. I only really advertised a Stalin book these days when guests reference Lissordo, so I am

going to do it here. Once again, listeners, you can get Stalin history and critique of a black legend on the Isker Books website, Iskerbooks.org. PDF is available for free download, and the print copies. look really cool. Reminder that we have an upcoming, by this, by the time this episode is out, the historic documents of the PLO book should probably be out. That'll also be coming out through ISCRA. That's a collaboration between guerrilla history and ISCRA books, which we wrote a forward to. All proceeds of that book are going to the Middle East Children's Alliance.

So while the PDF will be available for free, as with all ISCRA books, that book in particular, If you buy the physical copy, you know, they print them more or less at cost. There's not a huge profit margin here, folks. But all of the profit that comes in from that book is going to benefit those that Middle East Children's Alliance Mecca assist and particularly in Palestine, given the current situation in Gaza. So I highly recommend you do that. As for the show, listeners, you can help support us and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash. Gorilla History. That's G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow the show on Twitter to keep up with everything that we're doing individually and collectively at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A

underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you. Thank you.