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In the past decade a series of events including the outbreak of the Syrian war, drought and tireless insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa triggered the largest wave of displacement ever seen through and around the Mediterranean. The majority of those bound to Europe through the Mediterranean are smuggled by criminal networks. The proliferation of Trafficking and Smuggling of Human Beings (TSHB) between the Sahel and the Libyan shores feeds into the evolving threats of terrorism, crime and insecurity in the Sahel, West Africa and Europe. This paper explores the involvement of armed groups in TSHB in the Central Sahel and Libya. The author argues that the involvement of armed actors in the TSHB in the Central Sahel and Libya is not uniform and not systematically used for terrorism financing. Criminal networks and armed groups leverage opportunities created by conflict to generate profit and project power. They operate in convergent spaces benefitting from state fragility, and shared social networks. The link between terrorism and migrant smuggling and trafficking, if found, remains localized benefitting individuals rather than organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the formation of the modern Libyan state and the political, economic, and social transformations that accompanied it, from its independence in 1951 up to the period just before the disintegration of the state and its institutions due to the repercussions of the 2011 uprising. It focuses on the role played by the choices made by the ruling national elites in shaping the modern Libyan state during the two political regimes that governed Libya before the 2011 uprising: the Senussi Kingdom (1951-1969) and the Jamahiriya State (1969-2011). This study aims to test a fundamental hypothesis that the current crisis facing the Libyan state is deeply rooted in the manner in which the modern Libyan state was formed. This process was characterized by the inherent contradiction arising from the imposition of a modern nation-state on Libyan society through colonialism and a long historical trend of weakening the state’s institutional structure at the hands of the ruling political elites within both the monarchy and the Jamahiriya state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]