The United Nations has spent over a decade in Libya doing one thing consistently: failing. It has failed to broker elections, failed to unify rival governments, and failed to prevent the country from becoming a playground for Russian mercenaries, Turkish proxies, and transnational criminal networks. Now it is failing in a new and particularly consequential way. This week, representatives of Libya’s Amazigh, Tuareg, and Tebu communities issued a formal declaration stating they have lost all confidence in the UN Support Mission in Libya, rejected the outputs of the so-called 4+4 committee, and threatened to boycott any elections held under the current framework. The UN’s response has been silence. That silence is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it is building the conditions for Libya’s next war.
The U.N. has failed to broker elections, unify rival governments, or prevent the country from becoming a playground for Russian mercenaries, Turkish proxies, and transnational criminal networks.
The 4+4 committee is the UN’s latest attempt to break the deadlock between Libya’s two rival legislative bodies, the Tripoli-based High State Council and the Tobruk-based House of Representatives, which have failed to agree on a constitutional pathway to elections since 2021. The committee’s mandate is sweeping: it is tasked with drafting the legal and constitutional framework governing presidential candidacy conditions, electoral timing, and the composition of Libya’s national election commission. These are not procedural technicalities. They are the foundational rules that will determine who can run, who can vote, and who will count the ballots.
The Amazigh, Tuareg, and Tebu were given no seat at that table. Their coordinating body, which speaks for the Supreme Councils of the Amazigh and Tuareg communities and the Tebu National Assembly, addressed a formal memorandum to UN Secretary-General António Guterres characterizing the committee’s formation as a deliberate continuation of political exclusion. They described its architecture as reflecting the dominance of a single component of Libyan society, a clear reference to the Arab tribal and political networks that have monopolized both legislative chambers since the collapse of the Gaddafi state. Their assessment is not wrong.
Libya’s indigenous peoples are not a marginal constituency. The Amazigh have historical roots in the northwestern Nafusa Mountains and along the coast; the Tuareg control strategic corridors in the Fezzan; the Tebu populate the southeastern desert regions bordering Sudan, Chad, and Niger. These communities are not geographically peripheral to Libya’s security equation. They sit astride the smuggling and migration routes that feed instability across the Sahel, and their political alienation creates predictable opportunities for armed actors, criminal networks, and jihadist groups to entrench themselves in the vacuum.
Libya’s indigenous communities were not consulted on its formation, were not included in its sessions, and are now being asked to accept its outputs as legitimate national consensus.
The UN is not ignorant of this. Mission statements from UNSMIL routinely emphasize inclusion, diversity, and national partnership as preconditions for sustainable peace. Deputy Special Envoy Stephanie Williams acknowledged as recently as 2022 that all Libyan communities must participate in shaping their political future. That language has not translated into structural representation. The 4+4 committee is composed entirely of delegates from the two Arab-dominated legislative bodies. Libya’s indigenous communities were not consulted on its formation, were not included in its sessions, and are now being asked to accept its outputs as legitimate national consensus.
What the UN has produced is not a peace process. It is a mechanism for laundering exclusionary political arrangements with international credibility. When the Amazigh and Tuareg and Tebu say they will regard any election law or commission structure emerging from this process as illegitimate and nonbinding, they are not being obstructionist. They are stating a legal and political reality: agreements reached without the participation of affected parties do not produce durable outcomes. They produce the conditions for future contestation.
Washington should be paying attention for reasons that extend beyond humanitarian concern. The Fezzan, which the Tuareg and Tebu inhabit, has become a critical node in the Sahel security crisis. The collapse of the Malian state, the expansion of Russian Wagner successor forces, and the proliferation of jihadist networks from Burkina Faso to Niger have made Libya’s south a rear operating area for armed groups threatening American partners across the region. A political settlement in Tripoli that leaves the Fezzan’s population alienated and unrepresented is not a settlement. It is an invitation for those communities to seek alternative patrons, some of whom will not share Western interests.
Libya does not need another flawed process ratified by international silence. It needs a political architecture that reflects the actual composition of its society.
The United States has leverage over the UN process in Libya that it has consistently failed to use. American financial contributions to UNSMIL, combined with Washington’s seat on the Security Council, provide real tools for demanding structural reform of the political process. The 4+4 framework should either be expanded to include genuine indigenous representation or its outputs should not receive American endorsement. Legitimizing a constitutional framework built on exclusion because it is convenient for the two dominant factions does not advance stability. It accelerates the countdown to the next breakdown.
Libya does not need another flawed process ratified by international silence. It needs a political architecture that reflects the actual composition of its society. The Amazigh, Tuareg, and Tebu are telling the world, loudly and in formal diplomatic language, that the current arrangement fails that basic test. The question is whether anyone with the power to act is listening.
Published originally under the title “The U.N. Is Building Libya’s Next War by Excluding Its Indigenous Peoples.”
