Reflections on war, energy, human nature, and the civilisations that keep forgetting what they already knew

"Libya Isn't Reunifying — It's Being Privatized"
By Jose Parejo, Founding Partner, Jose Parejo & Associates

África Hoy (RTVE) Interviews Jose Parejo: "Libya Isn't Reunifying — It's Being Privatized"

A transcript of the August 5, 2026 broadcast on Radio Exterior de España, África Hoy, with Jose Parejo, CEO and founder of Jose Parejo y Asociados (JPA), a geopolitical intelligence firm.

Host: José, welcome. It's a real privilege to have you with us.

José Parejo: The pleasure is mine — thank you for the invitation.

Host: Let's start with the big question. When we talk about "reunifying" Libya, are we talking about merging two governments, or integrating two entirely different military, economic, and political systems?

Parejo: Before we can answer that, we need to ask a more basic question: what is Libya, actually? Because Libya has never really been a country in the Westphalian sense. It's a collection of tribes spread across three historic regions — Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan — stitched together artificially by Italy in 1934, and held together afterward only by oil revenue distributed from an authoritarian center controlled by Gaddafi. He didn't govern a fractured state — he managed that fracture, monetized it, and used it to buy tribal loyalty with petrodollars. So when that mechanism disappeared in 2011, no state collapsed. It simply proved that one had never existed. What we're watching today is the temporary management of tribal geography by a single man, minus the man.

There are two more observations I'd add, because together they frame everything else we'll discuss. Every phase of Libya's war has actually been a proxy war — third parties using Libyan territory as a chessboard, not a domestic Libyan conflict with outside interference, as it's usually described. That distinction changes everything about how you read the actors involved.

And the most uncomfortable point: Libyan oil doesn't finance the reconstruction of the state — it finances the longevity of its fracture. Every time production rises, as it did in 2026 with 12-year highs, it raises the incentive for every actor, internal and external, to preserve the current split rather than risk a unified state that would redistribute control of that revenue unpredictably. That's the paradox: the richer the fracture, the less profitable it becomes to actually solve it.

Host: That's a lot to unpack before we even get to elections. But first — what's changed in 2026 that's made Haftar's camp willing to explore power-sharing after fifteen years of stalemate?

Parejo: It's pure geopolitics. What's changed isn't Libya — it's the market around it. For nearly a decade, OPEC+ swam in a cushion of spare capacity of 5 to 6 million barrels a day, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE able to absorb any disruption without blinking, no matter what happened geopolitically elsewhere. That cushion has shrunk to just over 3 million barrels this year — the tightest market in more than a decade. In that kind of environment, a country producing around 1.3-something million barrels a day stops being an African footnote and becomes a piece of the global balance sheet. Libya no longer negotiates its future only among Libyans and regional sponsors — it negotiates in a market where every barrel weighs three times what it weighed in 2020. That's what's shifted, and that's what's making things move now.

Host: And what is Haftar actually negotiating for, in that context?

Parejo: This is the interesting part — Haftar isn't after a title. What he's really negotiating is a guaranteed succession. He's not securing his own position; he's trying to ensure his son inherits control of eastern Libya with the same international legitimacy that Dbeibah currently holds in Tripoli. It's the same move every rentier autocracy makes, anywhere in the world, when it senses time running out: convert personal power into dynasty before the patriarch weakens or loses outside backing. Which raises the real question — how much time does Haftar actually have left, and can Saddam Haftar sustain on his own what his father sustains today through a combination of military command and Egyptian-Emirati patronage?

Host: Are elections still a realistic path forward, or have they become a formula everyone defends publicly while quietly stalling it — in the same way that oil money isn't rebuilding the state but entrenching the division?

Parejo: Elections were never realistic — not once. I remember the first time the UN raised the idea, right after Gaddafi's fall. I was in the country frequently in those years — I know it well. Even then I thought: if you're talking about elections, you haven't understood this country's dynamics. Elections stopped being a solution years ago — they became a currency of legitimacy that every actor, the UN included, needs to keep invoking publicly without any real intention of cashing in. Look at the power structure holding up both Dbeibah and Haftar: neither wins from an open electoral process, because neither has a real civilian base that would survive a ballot box. What they have is armed control and control of revenue. That's why the plan actually advancing — Washington's — doesn't need elections at all. It replaces a popular mandate with a mandate of international sponsorship. That's not a Libyan anomaly — it's the pattern that repeats in every rentier state in crisis: the more elites depend on rent and the less they depend on citizens, the further democracy drifts as a real mechanism of power.

Host: Speaking of Washington's plan — what exactly is the US pushing for, and is reducing Russian presence the main goal, or is there more to it?

Parejo: There's more to it. Washington isn't in Libya for Libya's sake — it's managing something much bigger: containing Russian expansion in Africa without deploying its own troops, using oil and diplomatic legitimacy as low-cost instruments of containment. Reducing Russian presence is a goal, yes, but not the priority — the priority is having a single, predictable interlocutor to manage Mediterranean energy flows in a market with the lowest spare capacity in over a decade. If that also annoys Moscow, all the better. But notice what the Boulos plan doesn't demand: it doesn't require Russia's Africa Corps to leave its eastern bases. The US is willing to tolerate Russian presence — as long as it doesn't control the oil tap. That's the real line Washington has drawn, and it's much narrower than simply "expelling Russia from Libya."

Host: Russia and the US aren't the only players here, of course — Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Italy, France are all involved. What's actually pulling each of them into Libya, and keeping them there?

Parejo: This is genuinely complex, and that's exactly why I say each actor has very specific interests and agendas. The UAE and Egypt didn't back Haftar out of any affinity for Libya — they did it because Cyrenaica became the eastern frontier of their own regional war against political Islam after 2013 and everything that followed the Arab Spring. Russia wasn't in Libya for Libya either — it was after the central Mediterranean, and later, a corridor into the Sahel. And that calculation has only sharpened: this is the corridor connecting an already unstable Sahelian belt to the Indian Ocean via the war in Sudan, where the UAE and Russia share a deeper interest in keeping the whole region in managed chaos — the Emiratis funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces in exchange for Sudanese gold, while Russia's Africa Corps, Wagner's heir, operates as a logistics partner in that same war economy, effectively benefiting from both sides. And Turkey wasn't fighting for Tripoli either — it was securing its own Mediterranean coastline, against Greece and Cyprus, in the maritime border dispute. In that sense, Libya has never been the subject of its own war — it's been the terrain where others fought theirs.

Host: Given everything you've described, is reunification even possible — or if it happens, will it just be an artificial patch? What's the most likely path forward, in your view, as someone who's actually been on the ground there?

Parejo: The comparison my team at JPA and I keep coming back to isn't Somalia or Syria — this isn't a failed-state story. It's closer to post-Taif Lebanon, or the Kurdistan Region's relationship with Baghdad. What we're looking at is a stabilized revenue-sharing arrangement between two armed power centers, both internationally recognized, with a nominal capital that doesn't actually govern the other side's territory. That's the crucial part. That model can hold as long as the underlying asset funding it — foreign aid in Lebanon's case, northern oil in Kurdistan's — stays valuable enough that both sides prefer collecting their share over risking a fight for the whole thing. In Libya, that asset is the crude from Sirte and the Oil Crescent. The real risk isn't open war in the near term — it's a Kirkuk 2017 moment, when Baghdad decided it no longer needed to tolerate the arrangement and took the city by force in 48 hours. These condominiums look stable right up until one of the external sponsors decides the cost of maintaining them no longer pays off. And with OPEC+ spare capacity at its lowest in over a decade, that tipping point in Libya could arrive sooner than any UN roadmap currently assumes.

Host: If oil prices keep climbing, does that make the current arrangement more sustainable — and if they fall, does that give both sides more reason to actually fight each other?

Parejo: Yes — and this is where UN Resolution 2819 matters, adopted by the Security Council back in April. It didn't just address channeling oil revenue payments — it also called for a full audit of Libya's frozen foreign assets, verification mechanisms, and so on. It's a complicated issue, but that underlying dynamic you're describing is exactly right.

Host: We're unfortunately out of time, but Jose Parejo, it's been a genuine pleasure speaking with you. It's rare that we get to spend this long with someone who understands a subject this complex — and this often hidden — as well as you do. Thank you for your time.

Parejo: The pleasure was mine. Thank you.

— Jose Parejo

Founding Partner, Jose Parejo & Associates (JPA)

Sunday CEO Strategic Insights | Aug 5, 2026

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