Murat Aslan

In this panel, experts in their fields discussed the ways and purposes of foreign actors' involvement in Libya, the political order in post-revolution Libya, and Turkey's Libya policy and shared their views on the course of events in Libya. The panel was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was broadcast live on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Libya, inspired by the February 17 revolution but devastated by post-revolt challenges, is struggling to build order, as state, non-state, and external actors exacerbate the already fragile security environment. Among these actors, state and non-state actors pose a repeating and paradoxical dilemma. Libya’s post-Qaddafi state structure has been formed by non-state armed actors, and at the same time these actors threaten the survival of the state; certain non-state armed groups compete against each other to accumulate more power, while in some cases being legitimized and funded by the state itself. The root causes of this paradoxical situation can be scrutinized by investigating the security culture inherited from Qaddafi’s regime, particularly its inefficient and ignored security institutionalization, and the efforts of the competing armed groups to dominate their areas of influence in the absence of a coherent state structure.

In Stratejik İstihbarat ve Ulusal Güvenlik (Strategic Intelligence and National Security), Merve Seren scrutinizes intelligence by its ‘own’ strategic relevance and displays the mutual interaction of ‘strategy’ and ‘intelligence.’ The subject matter is the construction of strategic intelligence and its role in the course of history, with a clear focus on its ideational evolvement. The main design of the study is to highlight the sine qua non feature of ‘strong’ and ‘realistic’ strategic intelligence for national security strategies and the policies of state actors.