By the time the uprising in 2011 took place, Tripoli had been a boom town for several years, reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. A string of luxury hotels appeared along the corniche, their lobbies filled with foreign businessmen and local intermediaries pursuing each other in search of opportunities that the lifting of sanctions and the burgeoning revenues from oil sales once more made possible. To anyone who had known the country during the austere years of its revolution, when virtually all private businesses had been abolished or withered away for lack of provisions, the city’s streets had been transformed beyond recognition. Many of the revolutionary slogans that had once punctuated urban and rural landscapes alike were giving way to commercial advertising signs. The once ubiquitous portraits of the Leader now vied for attention alongside commercial dioramas that touted an array of products Libyans once could only dream about – most dramatically, advertisements for airline destinations outside the Jamahiriyya. Small shops lined the main streets of the city selling imported food, appliances and furniture. Glittering malls in Tripoli’s Hay al-Andalus were now filled with brand-name electronics and other expensive foreign luxuries. Prices for real estate in the area skyrocketed, and private supermarkets now stocked international foods Libyans could only dream of a few years earlier.

But in the wake of the civil war the essential questions that have dogged Libya since its creation as an independent state in 1951 are still left unresolved: the creation of an institutionalized state, and the incorporation of the country’s citizens into a meaningful nation. When the uprising started in February 2011, the territories that formed the independent United Kingdom of Libya and then the Jamahiriyya had existed for six decades. During that time, Libya had been changed beyond recognition – from a desert-strewn backwaters to a modern oil economy with intricate links to the international economy. A tribal, impoverished, and barely self-sustaining society had endured the Sanusi monarchy with its confused sense of what political community it represented, and then four decades of the diktats of a revolutionary regime that seemed determined to destroy whatever institutions could create any sense of political community.