Omar Ashour: Four roads ahead for Libya in transition

MIDDLE Eastern autocrats routinely warn their people of rivers of blood, Western occupation, poverty, chaos, and al-Qaeda if their regimes are toppled.

However, there is a strong belief across the region that the costs of removing autocracies, as high as they might be, are low compared to the damage inflicted by the current rulers.

In Libya, four scenarios may negatively affect prospects for democratisation: civil/tribal war, military rule, becoming "stuck in transition," and partition.

The civil/tribal war scenario is the worst risk. Egypt's revolutionaries understood this. When sectarian violence erupted there following the removal of Hosni Mubarak, the revolutionary coalitions adopted the slogan, "You won't gloat over this, Mubarak".

So, to win, Libya's Colonel Muammar Gadaffi has successfully turned a civil resistance campaign into an armed conflict.

That will have ramifications in the post-authoritarian context. A study published by Columbia University on civil resistance has shown that the probability of a country relapsing into civil war following a successful anti-dictatorship armed campaign is 43 per cent, versus 28 per cent when the campaign is unarmed.

Libya, of course, can survive the gloomy prospect of post-authoritarian civil war. But this requires containing tribal and regional polarisation, as well as the rivalries between the interim national council (INC) and the military council (MC), and between senior military commanders.

Violent polarisation has developed not only between Eastern and Western tribes, but also between some of the Western tribes.

Another negative scenario is military rule. Several figures from the "free officers" - the group that plotted the 1969 coup against the monarchy - are leading the INC.

Unlike Egypt, however, whoever takes power in Libya will not necessarily inherit poor economic conditions that could threaten their legitimacy and undermine their popularity. This might lead a group of senior officers to rule directly, especially if victory in Libya comes militarily.

However, four decades of military-based dictatorship may be enough for Libyans.

Getting "stuck in transition" is a third possible scenario, with Libya remaining in a "gray zone" - neither a fully-fledged democracy nor a dictatorship, but "semi-free". This means regular elections, a democratic constitution, and civil society, coupled with electoral fraud, human rights violations, and restrictions on civil liberties.

Getting stuck in transition usually kills the momentum for democratic change, and widespread corruption, weak state institutions, and lack of security serve to reinforce a myth of the "just autocrat." Vladimir Putin's rule in Russia illustrates this outcome.

The fourth scenario is partition, with the old three-province, Ottoman-style set-up commonly mentioned: Cyrenaica (east), Fezzan (south), and Tripolitania (west).

All of these scenarios will be affected by outcomes in Egypt and Tunisia. In the case of democratic transitions, a success nearby often helps at home.

Either, or both, could offer Libya successful transition models.

• Omar Ashour is director of the Middle East graduate studies programme at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He is the author of the De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements.