The Case of Libya: From A Destination Country to aTransit One

Abstract

The Western perception regarding the social and political organization of the African people and their politics has given birth, long before European expansions overseas, to the idea that these societies are organized primarily into rural cohesive communities, homogeneous, ethnically defined, and therefore necessarily also stable within their own territory. African social formations thus do not change throughout time and remain within their own lands. Within these groups, the rights of people, and the natural resources they use, would then be defined by an ancient customary order and guaranteed over time by the “traditional authorities”[1]. Indeed, the Western perceptions of Africa as well as their models of democracy and politics, and the application of these models in the Third World have always been improper. With the begging of independence in Africa, the states and political systems in the continent have been analyzed in its relation to the Western models of development and modernization, which are different from the internal models of the historical transformation of the Western developments (Gentili 2008:11).

[1]For depthunderstanding of the concept of traditionalauthorities; Pleasesee: Mario Zamponi, Fra tradizione e modernità. autorità tradizionali e potere nei processi di sviluppo rurale e di decentralizzazione in africa australe, Bologna, 2011.