This article examines how administrative statelessness functions as a deliberate governance strategy across successive Libyan regimes, with particular focus on the Tuareg communities of the Fezzan region. The delay examined here did not begin with the 2011 revolution: Tuareg families who settled permanently in Libya from the 1950s onward submitted citizenship applications in the 1970s and 1980s that were never answered, their status left in indefinite review under the Gaddafi state itself. Drawing on qualitative case study methods — including field observation and semi-structured interviews with affected community members, and systematic document analysis of Libyan nationality legislation, civil registry procedures, and the 2013 National Identification Number (NIN) system — the study investigates how bureaucratic mechanisms interact with political inaction to produce and reproduce statelessness across generations. The analysis identifies three interlocking dynamics: an inversion of the legal burden of proof; a constitutional paradox in which post-2011 institutions disclaim the authority to grant nationality while exercising punitive investigative powers; and the cascading civic exclusion generated by the NIN reform. The findings challenge characterisations of Tuareg statelessness as bureaucratic backlog, demonstrating instead that delay functions as active policy. A fourth dynamic — identified through primary banking sector documentation and military recruitment records — reveals a structural double standard: documentation requirements that are enforced with bureaucratic rigidity to exclude stateless persons from banking and formal employment are applied with operational flexibility when the state requires their military service. The article concludes that continued administrative delay carries compounding costs for Libyan state security, social cohesion, and intergenerational human development, and calls for a rights-based resolution grounded in documented residency and civic contribution.
In the vast expanse of the Libyan Sahara, an entire population lives in a condition of legal non-existence. For the Tuareg of the Fezzan, the desert is a home they have inhabited for centuries — long before the modern borders of 1951 were drawn,[1] long before Tripoli held any administrative claim over the southern territories. Yet in the eyes of central authorities, they are routinely framed as an external threat: a demographic problem, alleged mercenaries from the Sahel, a population to be managed rather than a community to be recognised.
This article argues that the burden of proof for citizenship has been systematically displaced onto the Tuareg, and that the Libyan state — across successive regimes — has used administrative delay as a deliberate instrument of structural exclusion. The pattern is not a post-revolutionary phenomenon. Tuareg families who settled permanently in Libya during the 1950s and 1960s submitted citizenship applications in the 1970s and 1980s whose files were left in indefinite suspension under the Gaddafi state itself. Documented cases include a family continuously resident in Libya since 1957 that has not received Libyan nationality across seven decades of application.
The article further identifies a constitutional paradox that has intensified since 2011: an Attorney General’s office that claims it lacks the legal authority to grant nationality while simultaneously exercising the power to audit, suspend, and effectively revoke nationality decisions made by prior administrations.[2] The longer the Libyan authorities politicise this file, the higher the cost will be — not only for the Tuareg, but for the nation’s security, social cohesion, and institutional credibility.
The This article asks: how, and through what mechanisms, has the Libyan state used administrative procedure to reproduce Tuareg statelessness across successive political regimes? The article proceeds as follows. Section II situates the study within the relevant scholarly literature on statelessness theory, bureaucratic exclusion, Tuareg and Saharan governance, and African citizenship law. Section III describes the methodology and introduces the distinction between the permanent and temporary civil registries as a governance structure. Sections IV through VI analyse the three core mechanisms of administrative exclusion: the inversion of the burden of proof, the constitutional paradox of a state that disclaims authority to grant while exercising authority to revoke, and the use of criminal investigation as an instrument of delay. Section VII documents the community’s organised civic response through the No Discrimination movement. Section VIII analyses the 2013 NIN reform as the technical mechanism that automated and deepened exclusion, including its documented consequences for banking and formal economic participation. Sections IX and X examine the generational and human costs of exclusion in lived experience. Section XI addresses the mercenary accusation historically and exposes the documented double standard in which military recruitment requirements are applied with a flexibility that banking and employment requirements are not. Section XII assesses the compounding costs of continued delay for Libyan security and social cohesion. Section XIII concludes with a call for a rights-based resolution framework and concrete policy recommendations.
The foundational theoretical anchor for any study of statelessness remains Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights” (Arendt, 1951). Writing in the aftermath of mass displacement produced by twentieth-century totalitarianism, Arendt identified the loss of nationality not as a deprivation of particular rights, but as expulsion from the political community that makes rights meaningful at all. The condition she described — of people rendered “superfluous” by a state that would neither protect nor expel them — resonates directly with the Tuareg case, in which the Libyan state maintains a population as a permanently provisional presence: acknowledged enough to be governed, denied enough to remain without legal standing.
Laura van Waas’s Nationality Matters: Statelessness under International Law (2008) provides the most comprehensive technical mapping of the international normative framework. Her analysis of the burden of proof problem is particularly relevant: she identifies the structural difficulty of requiring individuals to demonstrate the absence of any nationality in legal systems designed to confirm identity rather than investigate its absence. The Libyan case represents an acute variant of this problem, as the state has inverted the burden further still — requiring long-resident communities to disprove fraudulent acquisition of nationality rather than simply demonstrate continuous residence.
Blitz and Lynch (2011) extend the theoretical discussion into empirical ground, documenting across eight country cases the concrete costs of statelessness at individual and community level. Their comparative framework — tracing deprivations in employment, property, education, civil registration, healthcare, and political participation — provides a direct analytical template for the civic exclusions documented in the Fezzan. The Tuareg case maps closely onto their typology of “de facto” statelessness. Kochenov (2024) further argues that the dominant paradigm tends to naturalise racialised hierarchies of citizenship rather than interrogate them.
Das and Poole’s edited volume Anthropology in the Margins of the State (2004) provides the central theoretical scaffolding for this study’s analysis of administrative mechanisms. Their argument — that “margins” are not peripheral to the working of the state but reveal its fundamental logic — reframes the Fezzan from an exception to Libyan governance into a diagnostic site. Lipsky’s foundational work on street-level bureaucracy (1980) established that policy is made not only at the legislative level but in the discretionary decisions of individual functionaries. In the Libyan case, this discretion is institutionalised as systemic suspension: a refusal to process files that creates the appearance of procedural regularity while producing the same outcome as outright denial. Scott’s analysis of legibility projects (1998) provides a complementary lens: the 2013 NIN reform can be read as precisely such a project, with the critical difference that communities already rendered administratively invisible were locked into their invisibility by it.
The Clingendael Institute’s work on traditional authorities in southern Libya (2019) documents how Tuareg and Tebu institutions were selectively co-opted into the Gaddafi governance apparatus and subsequently marginalised after 2011. Abukhzaam’s qualitative case study of Fezzan marginalisation (2023) provides longitudinal analysis across three political eras, confirming that the region’s peripheral status is structural rather than incidental. Chatham House’s research on migrant smuggling networks (2025) provides important documentation of the security consequences of civic exclusion: former police officers and military personnel whose salaries were terminated following the NIN reform moved directly into informal and criminal economies. A recent investigation by Middle East Eye (2026) confirms that between 16,000 and 17,000 families remain in provisional civil registries.
Bronwen Manby’s Citizenship Law in Africa (2015) and Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging (2018) constitute the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of nationality law across the continent. Her observation that African politicians have found citizenship law a highly effective tool for preserving political power is directly applicable to the Libyan case, where the unresolved Tuareg file serves successive administrations as a mechanism for deflecting accountability while maintaining demographic control.
What is absent is a systematic analysis tracing the mechanisms through which administrative delay functions as deliberate policy across the full arc of the Libyan state — from Gaddafi-era strategic ambiguity in the 1970s and 1980s, through the NIN reform’s automation of exclusion in 2013, to the Attorney General’s constitutional paradox in the present. By combining Das and Poole with the legal analysis of van Waas and Manby, and grounding both in field-documented case evidence from the Fezzan, this study offers the first integrated account of administrative statelessness as a governance strategy in the Libyan context.
This study employs a qualitative case study design, selected on the grounds that the phenomenon under investigation — the use of administrative delay as a deliberate instrument of civic exclusion — is not amenable to quantitative measurement. A case study approach is appropriate when the research question concerns how and why a phenomenon operates, when the researcher has limited control over events, and when the case is embedded in a real-world context whose complexity is analytically significant.[3] The Tuareg communities of the Libyan Fezzan constitute the primary unit of analysis — selected as a theoretically significant case in which the conditions of administrative exclusion are unusually well-documented, the legal paradox is unusually explicit, and the generational dimension of delay is unusually severe.
Data were collected through three complementary methods, triangulated to strengthen validity. First, extended field observation was conducted across communities in the Fezzan over multiple periods. Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with community members directly affected by statelessness, community leaders, and local advocates. Interviews were conducted in Tamasheq and Arabic, with the researcher serving as primary interpreter, and participants recruited through purposive sampling. A total of forty-nine interviews were conducted: forty-one individual semi-structured interviews and two focus group interviews, each comprising four participants. Fieldwork was conducted between 2023 and 2026. All identifying details have been altered or withheld to protect participants. Third, systematic document analysis was applied to the primary legal and administrative record, including: Law No. 24 of 2010; Law No. 8 of 2014; decrees and circulars issued by the Attorney General’s office; civil registry procedural guidelines; and official correspondence communicated to affected families; banking sector account requirements across multiple Libyan financial institutions; and military recruitment announcements issued by Libyan armed forces commands in 2025–2026. Data analysis followed a pattern-matching approach consistent with Yin’s (2018) case study methodology: documentary evidence and interview testimony were coded thematically and cross-referenced to identify convergent patterns of administrative mechanism, with rival explanations — including bureaucratic incapacity and resource limitations — systematically considered and assessed against the evidence before the interpretation of delay as deliberate policy was advanced.
This research was conducted from an insider position: the researcher is a member of the Tuareg community with direct personal and professional engagement with the statelessness crisis analysed here. The insider position confers significant methodological advantages: access to affected families, community legal networks, and internal administrative correspondence, and the capacity to conduct interviews in Tamasheq without translation intermediaries. All interview quotations presented in this article have been translated from Arabic or Tamasheq by the author; original-language versions are recorded in field notes and are available to reviewers on request. At the same time, insider research carries well-documented risks of confirmation bias and advocacy-driven interpretation.[4] These risks have been managed through grounding all empirical claims in specific documented evidence, explicitly acknowledging complexity within the Tuareg community, and anchoring interpretations in established scholarly literature.
It is necessary to distinguish between the permanent citizens’ registry (al-sijill al-madani), which confers full Libyan nationality and all associated rights, and the temporary registry (al-sijill al-muaqqat), in which the majority of Tuareg families have been held for decades. Families held in the temporary registry occupied a position of conditional civic existence. They received documentation — birth certificates, family record books — sufficient for many practical purposes: school enrolment through to university level, and in many cases access to employment in smaller southern towns.[5] This conditional legibility was not legally secure — documents could be withdrawn at any bureaucratic threshold requiring permanent nationality status — but it represented a functioning, if precarious, accommodation.
The introduction of the NIN system in 2013, formalised under Law No. 8 of 2014,[6] collapsed this structure instantly. This provision rendered the temporary registry documents legally worthless. The civil registry simultaneously ceased registering new births and marriage records for families without a valid NIN.[7] The civil registry subsequently introduced an “administrative number” as a partial measure,[8] but this does not satisfy the NIN requirement and does not restore access to civic functions. It formalises secondary status without resolving it.
Official records confirm that more than 14,000 Tuareg families were stateless — a figure acknowledged as far back as Libya’s own Resolution 538 of 1987. Resolution 328 of 2009 subsequently granted citizenship to only 7,102 of those families, leaving the remainder in continued suspension.[9] Notably, no comparable figure was published for Arab families in equivalent documentary situations, despite community knowledge that such cases exist.[10] The selective enumeration and public framing of this as a Tuareg-specific problem is itself a political act.
Informed consent was obtained verbally rather than in writing, on the grounds that a signed document linking participants to this research could itself constitute a vulnerability. All participant identities have been anonymised, and identifying details altered or generalised where necessary.
Sampling was shaped by the researcher’s community networks, and communities with different experiences of the administrative process may be underrepresented. Libya’s institutional fragmentation has produced significant gaps in the public administrative record; where the documentary record is incomplete, this article relies on convergent testimony and secondary sources.
In a functional legal order, the burden of demonstrating that a long-resident individual does not qualify for citizenship rests with the state. Many Tuareg families settled permanently in Libya during the 1950s and 1970s, integrating into the economy, the military, and the civic and cultural life of the south.[11] They provided the documentation required under Libyan nationality law:[12] residency records, civil registrations, and tribal testimonies attested by local authorities.
The system has since inverted its own logic. Instead of the state demonstrating why a resident of seventy years does not qualify for citizenship, affected families must perpetually defend their existence before rotating committees and review boards.[13] By labelling them “Malian” or “Nigerien” — identities many have never held, and nationalities no other state will recognise them under — the authorities engage in a systematic form of administrative misclassification whose effect, if not always its stated purpose, is to sustain indefinite non-resolution.[14]
These families are not stateless because they failed a legal test. They are stateless because the state declined to complete one. It is a political choice to maintain a segment of the population in a condition of permanent vulnerability — sufficiently legible to be subject to state authority,[15] sufficiently invisible to be denied the protections that authority is supposed to carry.
The following testimony, from a forty-three-year-old man in the Fezzan whose father submitted a nationality file before his birth, encapsulates the generational dimension of procedural suspension:
‘My father submitted his file before I was even born. I am forty-three years old now. He has the receipts — the papers showing when the file was handed in. Every time we followed up, the answer was the same: a committee will be formed to review the files. How many times do our files need to be reviewed? I have been hearing that for decades.’[16]
Officials and legal commentators close to the Attorney General’s office have indicated, with varying degrees of candour, that granting or confirming nationality is beyond their current mandate.[17] The argument runs as follows: nationality law requires a legitimate, permanent government and a ratified constitution. In the absence of both, the state cannot take positive action.
This position would be coherent — if frustrating — if applied consistently. It is not. The same institutional actors who claim paralysis in the face of positive rights have shown no equivalent hesitation when it comes to auditing and effectively suspending nationality decisions made by prior administrations. The Attorney General’s office has overseen investigations into “nationality fraud” that function, in practice, as instruments for removing or freezing the status of Tuareg families whose documentation was approved under previous governments, including under the Gaddafi era.[18]
The constitutional logic is applied asymmetrically: the state cannot grant, but it can revoke. It cannot build, but it can demolish. An institution that acknowledges it lacks the constitutional authority to settle the nationality question has no legitimate basis to conduct a criminal audit that prejudges that same question. Jurisdiction cannot be simultaneously disclaimed and exercised punitively.
The investigation, led by Attorney General al-Siddiq al-Sour, resulted in the formation of 160 prosecution committees across Libya, composed of prosecutors alongside officers from the Civil Registry Authority and the forensic investigation service. The investigation claimed to have identified approximately 48,000 irregular national registry entries, leading to the cancellation of tens of thousands of national numbers and the suspension of salaries, grants, and passports.[19] These announcements were made exclusively through the AG office’s Facebook page — the only official communication channel used — with no published methodology, no criteria distinguishing fraud from administrative error, and no mechanism for affected individuals to challenge their inclusion in the suspect list.
The contested nature of the figures is itself analytically significant. The head of the Civil Registry Authority publicly denied claims of 890,000 forged NINs. A source inside the Civil Registry confirmed that the 48,000 figure includes NINs cancelled for purely technical reasons — duplicate numbers, date of birth errors, incorrect gender coding — subsequently classified as fraud without public clarification. A legal expert noted that the suspension of NINs for families in the eastern desert and among the al-Mahamid group may constitute racial discrimination under Libyan and international law.[20] This pattern of announcement without accountability is structurally designed to produce suspicion without the scrutiny that formal legal proceedings would require.
By framing the Tuareg’s historical presence as a subject of criminal investigation, the state converts a civil entitlement into a matter of prosecutorial suspicion. Families are notified that their status is “under review” — a designation with no defined timeline, no published criteria, and no mechanism for appeal.[21] This produces an administrative waiting room of indefinite duration, preventing an entire community from planning for the future, owning property, registering businesses, or participating in the formal civic life of the country.
A community maintained in permanent uncertainty is a community structurally disabled from organising, advocating, or demanding accountability.[22] Administrative delay is not the absence of policy. It is policy.
The experience of NIN suspension without due process recurs across the research sample. One participant, whose national number was cancelled during the Attorney General’s investigation, described learning of his changed status through a public Facebook post:
‘My NIN was suspended and I only found out from a Facebook post. The post said I was a foreign Malian national who had bribed someone to obtain a NIN. I have never held Malian nationality. I was born here. Both my parents are Libyan nationals. I did not know what to do. I just waited for the investigation to end.’[23]
The mechanisms of delay are not confined to the formal investigative process. They extend into routine interactions at the Passport and Nationality Department. Community members who visit to enquire about the status of their applications encounter a consistent pattern of institutional discouragement: staff communicate in cold, dismissive tones, with implicit and at times explicit signals that further processing is unlikely and that applicants should abandon their claims. No formal refusal is issued. No written decision is produced. The encounter ends with the applicant no better informed than before, but with the additional burden of having been told, informally and deniably, that hope itself is unwelcome.
Male community members in particular report an atmosphere of intimidation. The discouragement is gendered in its intensity: men who present themselves at nationality offices are more frequently subjected to insinuations about their security status, their loyalty, or the legitimacy of their claims. This dynamic operates as an extension of the mercenary accusation into the bureaucratic encounter. As one community member told Middle East Eye: every attempt to obtain identity documentation ends in refusal or indefinite postponement, under the pretext of a security file review or insufficient evidence.[24]
Crucially, affected individuals are denied the legal mechanisms that would convert uncertainty into a definitive outcome. No accessible complaint mechanism exists within the Passport and Nationality Department for those whose files are suspended. Affected individuals are not issued written decisions against which they could appeal, and the courts have no entry point through which a claim of administrative inaction can be brought. Community members who have spent years navigating this system report that they would welcome a definitive negative answer — that even adverse certainty would allow them to know where they stand and potentially pursue alternative legal routes. What the system offers instead is permanent, structureless uncertainty: a limbo without walls that cannot be challenged because it does not officially exist.[25]
This demand for a definitive answer — even a negative one — was articulated directly in interviews with movement participants. One participant described the breadth of suspension that activism cannot resolve:
‘I have attended many protests with the No Discrimination movement. I want solutions. My life is suspended. I cannot apply for scholarships or travel. I cannot board a plane between two cities inside the country because I have no ID. Taking a car between cities is a risk — you are stopped at checkpoints, especially in the north, and you spend your time explaining that you are a citizen.’[26]
The administrative exclusion documented in this article has not been met with passivity. Across multiple years and locations, the Tuareg community has organised a sustained civic response under the banner of the No Discrimination movement (لا للتمييز, La lil-Tamyeez), formally known as “No to Discrimination, Libya Unites Us” (لا للتمييز ليبيا تجمعنا). This movement represents a qualitatively significant transition from individualised administrative petitioning to organised collective demand for resolution.
The movement has organised demonstrations across Libya, including in Ubari in the Fezzan — where the August 2021 protest marked one of the most visible public mobilisations of the stateless Tuareg community to date — and in Tripoli, where a 2023 demonstration demanded the regularisation of Tuareg families excluded from the official census.[27] The geographical spread of these protests demonstrates that the statelessness crisis is not confined to the remote south but is actively lived and contested in Libya’s capital.
In February 2022, Tuareg and Tebu representatives met with the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Libya in Tripoli, urging UN cooperation and emphasising that the Geneva Road Map’s item 2.8 explicitly committed to addressing the administrative number issue.[28] This diplomatic engagement reflects a community that has exhausted domestic administrative channels and is actively seeking external accountability mechanisms.
The movement’s demands are notably modest in their legal ambition: a formal response, in writing, to applications pending for decades. Community members have stated repeatedly that they would accept a negative decision — that even an adverse outcome would be preferable to the permanent uncertainty in which they currently live, because it would at least constitute a legal fact against which remedies could potentially be pursued.[29] The state’s refusal to provide even this is among the clearest illustrations of the argument developed throughout this article: that delay is not bureaucratic failure but deliberate design.
The movement also reflects a broader coalition dynamic. Tuareg, Tebu, and stateless returned Arabs have organised together under the movement’s banner.[30] The joint participation of multiple communities directly challenges the official narrative that constructs statelessness as a specifically Tuareg — and therefore specifically suspect — problem.
Prior to 2013, Tuareg families held in the temporary registry possessed documentation sufficient for many practical purposes. The introduction of the NIN system in 2013, formalised under Law No. 8 of 2014,[31] destroyed this accommodation without replacing it. The NIN is issued exclusively to holders of a valid nationality certificate. For Tuareg families whose files were suspended, under review, or simply never processed, a single bureaucratic reform instantaneously cascaded into total civic exclusion. Without a NIN: no formal public sector employment, no bank account, no property registration, no access to subsidised goods, no social assistance, no passport, no scholarship application, no ability to formalise a marriage, a divorce, or a birth.[32]
The NIN reform did not create new discriminatory intent. It automated and systematised discrimination that already existed. The state did not assess how the reform would affect those without documentation. It did not create a transitional mechanism, a grace period, or an appeals process for affected communities.
The banking sector provides the most precise documentation of what exclusion-without-NIN means in practice. Across Libyan financial institutions, the national number is a mandatory condition for every category of personal account: electronic and personal accounts, salary accounts, and student accounts all require it without exception.[33] The non-citizen account category, where it exists, requires a valid foreign passport and active residency permit — documents equally beyond the reach of a stateless person who holds neither Libyan nationality nor any foreign status.[34] Central Bank of Libya Decision No. 100 of 2023 elevated this exclusion to a regulatory mandate across the entire banking sector.[35] The consequence is total financial non-existence: a stateless Tuareg person cannot receive a formal salary, open a business account, access credit, or participate in the formal economy in any capacity. The banking system has no account category for them.[36] It is notable that the Central Bank decision mandating NIN requirements was issued the same year that multiple government ministries were still circulating workaround memos acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of residents lacked those same numbers. The left hand of the state continued to erect barriers while the right hand was privately acknowledging that those barriers could not be cleared.
Documented pattern: young Tuareg who completed university education under temporary registry documentation, passed competitive examinations, and were awarded scholarships — domestic and international — found themselves unable to access those scholarships because passport applications require a NIN they cannot obtain. The scholarship expires. The opportunity closes. The state then points to the absence of Tuareg professionals in formal institutions as evidence of insufficient integration. It has engineered the very outcome it cites as justification for continued exclusion.[37]
The pattern documented in participant testimony is consistent with this mechanism. A participant from the Fezzan described how the NIN requirement foreclosed access to higher education for both himself and his sister:
‘I was unable to attend university in one of the big cities. They asked for a NIN. The same happened to my sister. We managed to find a school further from home. I stayed until the conflict in the town ended before I could go back to study.’[38]
A child born to a stateless Tuareg father — regardless of the mother’s nationality — cannot be registered in the civil registry without the father’s NIN.[39] Since 2014, the civil registry has ceased registering births and marriages for families in this situation.[40] There is no alternative pathway.
A woman who holds full Libyan nationality cannot transfer those rights to her own children if their father lacks a NIN.[41] Her citizenship does not protect them. A subsequent divorce does not resolve it. The children’s legal void is permanent and self-perpetuating, independent of any change in the parents’ circumstances.
These children attend school on administrative tolerance, not as a matter of right. That tolerance can be withdrawn at any bureaucratic threshold that demands documentation they cannot produce.[42] By refusing to register these births, the state reproduces statelessness across generations. This is not a bureaucratic backlog. It is the systematic erasure of the next generation of Tuareg from Libya’s civil record.
A parent of unregistered children — for whom no birth certificates have been issued — described the precarity of access to schooling and the compounding anxiety of a legal void that will worsen as her children age:
‘My children have nothing. They are not registered anywhere. No birth certificates have been issued for them. Many schools refuse to accept them. Only one school accepted them — because the headteacher knew me. I keep thinking about what will happen when they reach middle school. I need a birth certificate. They cannot be registered in the system without one.’[43]
The following documented patterns, drawn from interviews conducted with communities in the Fezzan, illustrate what these policies mean in lived experience. All individuals have been anonymised in accordance with the ethical protocol described in Section III.
A disabled Tuareg woman, formally assessed by social services as qualifying for state assistance, was denied those services because she could not provide a National Identification Number.[44] Her disability was acknowledged. Her need was confirmed. Her eligibility was established. The absence of a number — a number the state itself declines to issue — became the final, closed door.
Young Tuareg men and women with demonstrable academic qualifications were excluded from scholarship programmes at the moment of application — not on grounds of academic failure, but because passport applications require a NIN they cannot obtain.[45]
Across multiple families, the same pattern recurs: births unregistered, school enrolments provisional, marriages unrecognised in the civil system, property legally unownable, deaths sometimes unrecorded.[46] The community exists in every social and physical sense. In every administrative sense, it has been made to disappear.
The following testimonies, drawn from interviews conducted between 2023 and 2026, give specific form to this disappearance. A Tuareg woman who had held public sector employment described the cascade of losses that followed the NIN reform, including the concurrent loss of her father’s pension — a second participant interviewed separately:
‘I was born here. I finished school and managed to find a job — which I lost after the NIN reform. Once I became disabled, I could not register with social services.’[47]
A second participant — her father, interviewed separately — described the loss of his pension after thirty-five years of service in the Libyan public sector, a consequence of the same NIN cancellation process that had ended his daughter’s employment.[48]
A further dimension of this exclusion — its reach across every life stage simultaneously — is expressed with particular clarity by a young Tuareg woman who graduated top of her class but was barred from continuing her education:
‘I was first in my graduating class. I could not travel to continue my studies abroad. And even when I tried to pursue the specialisation I wanted, universities in the north required a national number. I could not continue. Now I hear that the administrative number is accepted — but it is too late. Seven years of my life are gone, and my circumstances have changed. The situation is hard. I think: if I get married, will I be able to register my marriage officially? If I have children, will the state recognise them and give them birth certificates? Even the welfare allowance for wives and daughters over eighteen — I cannot apply for it, because it requires a national number. I work in a shop for a modest salary.’[49]
A portion of Tuareg men did serve in Gaddafi’s military forces in 2011. The regime deliberately recruited young Tuareg for its brigades with promises of citizenship, though in practice only a documented cohort of 1,722 individuals was formally granted nationality under Resolution 328 of 2009.[50] Some of those individuals fled Libya following the revolution.[51] The Commando Brigade (لواء المغاوير), which operated primarily in the south, comprised approximately 1,000 Tuareg soldiers.[52] Community sources place the broader estimate of Tuareg across all Libyan army units at up to 16,000 — a figure that cannot be verified from official sources, in part because the Libyan state has never published a comprehensive accounting of its military composition by ethnicity. This silence is itself politically significant: the deliberate opacity around these numbers has allowed the “mercenary” accusation to expand far beyond any documented military participation.
What is systematically omitted from the political narrative is that a far greater number of Tuareg men refused military service and evaded conscription — at significant personal risk, at a time when desertion could be treated as treason.[53] The community was not monolithic. It was divided, pressured, and in many cases actively resistant.
Moreover, the Tuareg constituted a small minority within Gaddafi’s total military apparatus. Other tribes and communities contributed substantially larger contingents to regime forces.[54] None of those communities has faced equivalent collective punishment in the form of citizenship jeopardy.[55]
Collective guilt, applied ethnically and indefinitely, has no standing in any legal framework predicated on individual assessment.[56] The mercenary accusation endures not because of its legal merit but because of its political utility: it shifts attention from the state’s obligations to the community’s alleged collective crimes, recruits popular xenophobia in support of administrative exclusion, and provides successive administrations with a moral framing that insulates the policy from accountability.
The contemporary recruitment record reveals a further dimension to this contradiction. Formal military recruitment announcements from the Intelligence Directorate, the Ground Forces’ Battalion 101 Infantry, and the Special Forces Command, issued in 2025 and 2026, list Libyan nationality, personal identification, and in some cases the national number itself as prerequisites for enlistment.[57] On their face, these requirements mirror the documentation barriers operative in every other domain of civil life.[58] Yet Decision No. 27 of 2009 — which formed a committee to review nationality applications from Tuareg already employed in military and security service — demonstrates conclusively that these formal requirements were not enforced at the point of recruitment.[59] The asymmetry is structurally legible: a Libyan bank will reject a stateless person’s account application on the spot. Operational military recruitment in the south, conducted through informal networks and tribal intermediaries, applies no equivalent rigidity.[60] The Tuareg are, in effect, Libyan enough to be placed on its borders and not Libyan enough to open a bank account. This is not an inconsistency in the system. It is the system’s logic made visible: documentation requirements are enforced selectively, in proportion to whether the state needs something from or for the individual. Where the state requires service, requirements become negotiable. Where the state is asked to provide rights, they become absolute.[61]
The refusal to resolve the Tuareg nationality file is not a neutral act of administrative inertia. It is a form of structural violence[62] whose costs compound over time — for the Tuareg, and for Libya.
The economic exclusion is self-perpetuating. When a young person cannot obtain a public sector position, open a bank account, register a business, or access a scholarship because they lack a NIN, they are structurally excluded from every legitimate pathway to formal economic participation. The state then observes the resulting marginality and uses it to further justify its suspicion of the Tuareg. The cycle is self-sealing: exclusion generates the conditions subsequently cited as justification for exclusion.
The security implications are concrete, not theoretical. Research on smuggling networks in southern Libya documents that former police officers and military personnel whose salaries were terminated following the NIN reform moved directly into informal and criminal economies.[63] Non-state actors — smuggling networks, armed factions, recruitment networks — operate precisely in the administrative and governance vacuum that formal states create and then abandon.
The costs are generational. Every child born after 2013 who remains undocumented is a future adult with no formal relationship to the state — no obligation to it, no benefit from it, no reason to defend it.[64] The Libyan state is not merely failing to resolve a bureaucratic backlog. It is constructing a generation for whom the state is an abstraction that offered nothing and extracted everything.
The Libyan state has treated the Tuareg nationality file as though delay is a cost-neutral option — a deferral that preserves political flexibility while avoiding difficult decisions. The evidence assembled in this article demonstrates otherwise. Every year of delay is a year in which the social and security debt accumulates, a new cohort of children is born undocumented, qualified young people are excluded from opportunities they earned, and community members in need are denied assistance the state itself confirmed they require.
The Tuareg are not petitioning for a concession. They are asserting a legal status that many of them have already earned through decades of continuous residence, civic contribution, and — for many families — service to the Libyan state in its various iterations.[65] The constitutional argument for delay — that only a permanent government can settle the question — is rendered incoherent by the same state’s readiness to use criminal investigations to prejudge and effectively reverse that settlement. Jurisdiction cannot be simultaneously disclaimed and exercised punitively.
The cost of resolution is finite and manageable. It requires political will, a clear legal framework that applies documented residency and civic contribution as the primary criteria, and a commitment to treating the Tuareg as the residents and citizens many of them legally are. The cost of continued delay — measured in lost human potential, manufactured insecurity, and a generation raised outside any productive relationship with the state — is a cost Libya cannot sustainably bear, and a moral debt that does not diminish with time.
On the basis of this analysis, the following actions are recommended. For the Libyan state: the immediate establishment of a transparent, time-bound registration pathway for persons holding administrative ID numbers and documented Libyan residency, with written decisions issued in every case; a moratorium on deportation proceedings against individuals with established familial and residential ties to Libya pending comprehensive legal review; and a Central Bank directive clarifying that administrative number holders may access basic banking services pending nationality resolution. For international bodies: UNHCR should conduct a comprehensive statelessness determination survey in southern Libya, with specific focus on Tuareg and Tebu communities; the UN Human Rights Council should incorporate the banking exclusion and military double standard documented here into Universal Periodic Review processes; and the African Union should invoke the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in relation to the right to nationality and the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of ethnic origin. The No Discrimination movement’s own demand — modest in its legal ambition, urgent in its human stakes — remains the most appropriate starting point: a formal written response, within a defined timeframe, to applications that have been pending for decades.
Abukhzaam, A. (2023). Marginalization of Fezzan Region in Libya. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 516. Claremont Graduate University.
Al Jazeera Arabic (2026, 9 January). What Happened in the Case of National Number Forgery in Libya? Available at: aljazeera.net.
Al Sharq Strategic Research Forum (2022, 4 April). In Fezzan, Stateless Minorities Continue to Demonstrate for their Right to Vote. Doha: Al Sharq Forum.
Amnesty International (2024). Libya: Human Rights Report 2024. London: Amnesty International.
Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books.
Blitz, B.K. and Lynch, M. (eds.) (2011). Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality. Edward Elgar.
Chatham House (2025). How Migrant Smuggling Has Fuelled Conflict in Libya. London: Chatham House.
Clingendael Institute (2019). Traditional Authorities in Libya: State Neglect and Alliance Formation. The Hague: Clingendael.
Das, V. and Poole, D. (eds.) (2004). Anthropology in the Margins of the State. School of American Research Press.
Elbiro Media (2022). Statelessness in Libya: How Belonging Became the Playing Field of the State. Available at: elbiro.net.
European Network on Statelessness (2020, April). Rejected by the Homeland: Stateless Libyan Tuareg and the Role of Migration. Available at: statelessness.eu.
Farmer, P. (2004). An Anthropology of Structural Violence. Current Anthropology, 45(3), 305–325.
Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191.
Human Rights Watch (2011). Libya: Stop Arbitrary Arrests of Black Africans. 4 September 2011. New York: HRW.
Kochenov, D. (2024). Statelessness: A Radical Rethinking of the Dominant Citizenism Paradigm. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 20, 117–139.
Lacher, W. (2014). Libya’s Fractious South: Insecurity and Governance Vacuum. Small Arms Survey Dispatch No. 3. Geneva: Small Arms Survey.
Libya al-Ahrar (2023, 13 May). Evidence of Forgery in the Civil Registry System; AG Forms Committees to Examine It. Available at: libyaalahrar.tv.
Libya Observer [Arabic] (n.d.). Civil Registry Authority Denies Allegations of Large-Scale Forgery in National Number Database. Available at: ar.libyaobserver.ly.
Libyan General People’s Committee (2009). Resolution No. 328 of 1377/2009 on Granting Libyan Nationality to Some Persons [Arabic: قرار اللجنة الشعبية العامة رقم 328 لسنة 1377 و.ر بالموافقة على منح الجنسية العربية الليبية لبعض الأشخاص]. Issued 28 Rajab 1377 / 2009. Six family registers (kawashif) covering 707 persons (Kashf 1), 840 persons (Kashf 2), 83 persons (Kashf 3), 59 persons (Kashf 4), 25 persons (Kashf 5), and 8 persons (Kashf 6). Total: 1,722 individuals. Primary document held by author.
Libyan News Agency — LANA (2025, 18 April). AG Urges Investigators to Pursue Criminal Proceedings Against Those Involved in Civil Registry Manipulation. Available at: lana.gov.ly.
Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russell Sage Foundation.
Manby, B. (2015). Citizenship Law in Africa: A Comparative Study (3rd ed.). African Minds / Open Society Foundations.
Manby, B. (2018). Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging. Hart Publishing.
Mercer, C. (2007). The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro. Development and Change, 33(1), 101–127.
Middle East Eye (2021, 27 September). Libya: Stateless Tuareg Demand Rights and Inclusion Ahead of Elections. Available at: middleeasteye.net.
Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February). Libya’s Stateless Tuareg: A Forgotten Human Rights Crisis at Risk of Imminent Explosion. Available at: middleeasteye.net.
Minority Rights Group International (2022). Tuareg in Libya. London: MRG.
Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
UNHCR (2018). Libya Statelessness Report. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
US Department of State (2021). Libya 2021 Human Rights Report. Washington DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
van Waas, L. (2008). Nationality Matters: Statelessness under International Law. Intersentia.
Yin, R.K. (2018). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods (6th ed.). SAGE.
PRIMARY LEGAL SOURCES
Civil Registry Issuance Office, Wadi al-Hayat (2014). Official Correspondence, Reference No. 44-1-2, dated 9 February 2014. Signed: Abd al-Rahman Ahmad Salih al-Suqi, Registry Officer, Wadi al-Hayat. Ministry of the Interior.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). UN General Assembly Resolution 2200A (XXI), 16 December 1966. Art. 2 (non-discrimination).
Libyan General National Congress (2014). Law No. 8 of 2014 on the National Number. Issued 24 March 2014. Published in the Official Gazette.
Libyan General People’s Committee (1981). Resolution No. 538 of 1397/1987 [Arabic: قرار رقم 538 لسنة 1987م بتعديل حكم القرار بشأن الضوابط الخاصة بالعائدين من المهجر]. Amendment of provisions on diaspora returnees and proof of Libyan Arab origin. Issued 2 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 1397 / 25 July 1987. Primary document held by author.
Libyan General People’s Committee (2009). Resolution No. 328 of 1377/2009 on Granting Libyan Nationality to Some Persons. Issued 19 Rajab 1377 / 2009.
Libyan General People’s Congress (2010). Law No. 24 of 2010 on the Provisions of Libyan Nationality. Issued in Sirte, 28 January 2010. Published in the Journal of Legislations.
Zenith Magazine (2021). Libya’s Forgotten Ones. Zenith: The Middle East & North Africa Magazine. Available at: magazine.zenith.me.
Arab Islamic Investment Bank (2024). Account Opening Requirements [Arabic]. Official Facebook post, 28 October 2024. Available at: facebook.com.
Central Bank of Libya (2023). Decision No. 100 of 2023 on Account Opening Requirements for Banks. Available at: lawsociety.ly.
Intelligence Directorate (Istikhbarat) (2026). Military Recruitment Announcement [Arabic]. Join date 1 January 2026. Unpublished circular.
Libyan Arab Armed Forces, Ground Forces Command (2025–2026). Recruitment Announcement, Battalion 101 Infantry [Arabic]. Unpublished circular.
Libyan Arab Armed Forces, Special Forces Command (2025–2026). Recruitment Announcement [Arabic]. Unpublished circular.
Nuran Bank (NUB) (2025–2026). Account Requirements and Important Notes [Arabic]. Official published requirements document. Available at: facebook.com/nubbank.ly.
National Commercial Bank of Libya (n.d.). Personal Current and Savings Accounts [Arabic]. Available at: ncb.ly/ar/personal/current-and-savings-accounts/.
[1]United Nations (1951). Libya: UN General Assembly Resolution 387(V), 17 November 1950; Treaty of Peace with Italy (1947), Annex XI; see also Manby, B. (2015). Citizenship Law in Africa: A Comparative Study (3rd ed.). African Minds, p. 29.
[2]Al Jazeera Arabic (2026, 9 January). What Happened in the Case of National Number Forgery in Libya? Available at: aljazeera.net; Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February). Libya’s Stateless Tuareg: A Forgotten Human Rights Crisis at Risk of Imminent Explosion. Available at: middleeasteye.net.
[3]Yin, R.K. (2018). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods (6th ed.). SAGE, p. 15.
[4]Mercer, C. (2007). The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro. Development and Change, 33(1), 101–127.
[5]Civil Registry Issuance Office, Wadi al-Hayat (2014). Official Correspondence, Reference No. 44-1-2, dated 9 February 2014. Signed: Abd al-Rahman Ahmad Salih al-Suqi, Registry Officer. Confirms registration in temporary registry of Ubari; no administrative number issued; certificate valid only for uses not conflicting with the law.
[6]Libyan General National Congress (2014). Law No. 8 of 2014 on the National Number (al-Raqm al-Watani), Art. 1: no document or service may be issued by any state institution without the National Number.
[7]Law No. 8 of 2014, Art. 9: relevant authorities to prevent new registrations and set a time limit to resolve suspended cases. See also Civil Registry Issuance Office, Wadi al-Hayat, Ref. 44-1-2, 9 February 2014.
[8]Law No. 8 of 2014, Art. 8: prohibits temporary national numbers; mandates administrative procedures for previously registered individuals pending final resolution, without conferring NIN status.
[9]Elbiro Media (2022). Statelessness in Libya: How Belonging Became the Playing Field of the State. Available at: elbiro.net. Confirms Libyan General People’s Committee, Resolution No. 538 of 1397/1987, acknowledging more than 14,000 stateless Tuareg families; and Resolution No. 328 of 2009, granting citizenship to 7,102 of them.
[10]Community knowledge, Fezzan; identities withheld to protect individuals. Arab families in equivalent documentary situations exist but are not publicly enumerated by the state.
[11]Participant AI, Ubari (interview, 2022–2024); Manby, B. (2015). Citizenship Law in Africa, pp. 62–65; UNHCR (2018). Libya Statelessness Report. Geneva: UNHCR.
[12]Libyan General People’s Congress (2010). Law No. 24 of 2010 on the Provisions of Libyan Nationality, Art. 2 (citizenship for those regularly resident in Libya on 10/07/1951); see also Law No. 17 of 1987 on Nationality, which governed applications submitted in the 1970s and 1980s.
[13]Participant AI, Ubari (interview, 2022–2024); Participant MI, Ubari (interview, 2022–2024); Civil Registry Issuance Office, Wadi al-Hayat, Ref. 44-1-2, 9 February 2014.
[14]Participant AI, Ubari (interview); Participant MI, Ubari (interview); corroborated by Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February).
[15]Participant MZ, Lyon (interview, 2022–2024); Participant AB, Tunis (interview, 2022–2024).
[16]Interview with a Tuareg man, aged 43, Fezzan, 2023–2024. Translated from Arabic by the author. Original Arabic available on request. The participant holds documentary evidence of his father’s original file submission, including dated receipts issued by the civil registry.
[17]Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February); Al Sharq Strategic Research Forum (2022, 4 April). In Fezzan, Stateless Minorities Continue to Demonstrate for their Right to Vote. Doha: Al Sharq Forum; Participant AI, Ubari (interview).
[18]Al Jazeera Arabic (2026, 9 January); Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February); Al Sharq Forum (2022, 4 April).
[19]Libya al-Ahrar (2023, 13 May). Evidence of Forgery in the Civil Registry System; AG Forms Committees to Examine It. Available at: libyaalahrar.tv. Confirms AG al-Siddiq al-Sour’s announcement of 160 prosecution committees; Al Jazeera Arabic (2026, 9 January).
[20]Al Jazeera Arabic (2026, 9 January). The Civil Registry Authority publicly denied claims of 890,000 forged NINs. An internal source confirmed the 48,000 figure includes NINs cancelled for technical reasons (duplicate numbers, date-of-birth errors, gender coding errors) subsequently classified as fraud without clarification. A legal expert cited in the same report stated that NIN suspension of eastern desert families and al-Mahamid may constitute racial discrimination (tamyeez ʿrinsiyy) under Libyan and international law. The AG office did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
[21]Participant MI, Ubari (interview); Participant MA, Tripoli (interview); Civil Registry Issuance Office, Wadi al-Hayat, Ref. 44-1-2, 9 February 2014.
[22]Blitz, B.K. and Lynch, M. (eds.) (2011). Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality. Edward Elgar; van Waas, L. (2008). Nationality Matters: Statelessness under International Law. Intersentia.
[23]Interview with a Tuareg man, Fezzan, 2024. Translated from Arabic by the author. The participant’s NIN suspension was communicated via a public announcement on the Attorney General’s official Facebook page, without prior individual notification, formal charge, or stated right of appeal.
[24]Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February). The article quotes Abdulbaqi Hamdi, a Tuareg in his early twenties, describing how every attempt to obtain identity documentation ends in refusal or indefinite postponement under the pretext of a security file review or insufficient evidence.
[25]Community knowledge, Fezzan; Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February).
[26]Interview with a Tuareg activist and No Discrimination movement participant, Fezzan/Tripoli, 2024–2025. Translated from Arabic by the author. The checkpoint detention described is consistent with field observation at internal road checkpoints in northern Libya, where the absence of a national ID card routinely subjects southern travellers to prolonged questioning.
[27]Middle East Eye (2021, 27 September). Libya: Stateless Tuareg Demand Rights and Inclusion Ahead of Elections. Available at: middleeasteye.net. Confirms August 2021 demonstration in Ubari; estimates 40,000–60,000 stateless in Libya. See also Middle East Eye (2026, 4 February).
[28]Al Sharq Strategic Research Forum (2022, 4 April). Confirms February 2022 meeting between Tuareg/Tebu representatives and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Libya; confirms Geneva Road Map item 2.8 committed to addressing the administrative number issue.
[29]Participant AI, Ubari (interview); Participant MI, Ubari (interview); Participant MA, Tripoli (interview).
[30]Al Sharq Strategic Research Forum (2022, 4 April). Confirms joint Tuareg, Tebu, and returned Arab participation in the No Discrimination movement.
[31]Libyan General National Congress (2014). Law No. 8 of 2014, Art. 1.
[32]Law No. 8 of 2014, Arts. 1, 4, 7; field observation, Fezzan communities, 2022–2024.
[33]Nuran Bank (NUB), “Account Requirements and Important Notes” [Arabic], official published requirements document, 2025–2026. Explicitly states: “al-Raqm al-Watani” (National ID Number) as mandatory condition for electronic/personal accounts, salary accounts, and student accounts without exception.
[34]Arab Islamic Investment Bank, official Facebook post, 28 October 2024: account opening requirements for citizens include national number, personal ID card, and passport. The non-citizen category requires valid passport and valid residency permit — a category that has no application for stateless persons who possess neither foreign passports nor residency documentation.
[35]National Commercial Bank of Libya, official website personal accounts section (ncb.ly/ar), confirming national number as a mandatory condition for all personal account types. Confirmed also by Central Bank of Libya Decision No. 100 of 2023, which mandates national ID numbers across all banks operating in Libya as a regulatory requirement. The decision was issued the same year government ministries were still circulating workaround memos for persons without national numbers, illustrating the regulatory contradiction at the heart of Libyan administrative policy.
[36]The structural exclusion of stateless persons from banking is not a gap in the system; it is a direct product of the NIN requirement’s architecture. A stateless Tuareg person is simultaneously ineligible for the citizen account category (no national number) and the non-citizen account category (no foreign passport, no residency permit). No account category exists for them. This is confirmed across Nuran Bank, Arab Islamic Investment Bank, and National Commercial Bank documentation.
[37]Participant IM, Sebha (interview, 2022–2024); Participant MI, Ubari (interview, 2022–2024).
[38]Interview with a Tuareg man, Fezzan, 2023–2024. Translated from Arabic by the author. The participant’s sister was similarly excluded. The school they attended as an alternative was in a smaller settlement at a distance from their home town. Field observation corroborates the pattern of displacement to peripheral institutions.
[39]Law No. 8 of 2014, Art. 4: the NIN is issued from birth based on the person’s data in the civil registry; families without a valid NIN on the paternal line cannot initiate a birth registration entry.
[40]Civil Registry Issuance Office, Wadi al-Hayat, Reference No. 44-1-2, 9 February 2014.
[41]Libyan General People’s Congress (2010). Law No. 24 of 2010, Arts. 3(c) and 11: maternal transmission is discretionary and limited; children of Libyan women married to non-Libyans may be granted nationality but are not automatically entitled. Confirmed by US Department of State (2021). Libya 2021 Human Rights Report. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
[42]Participant MA, Tripoli (interview); Participant AI, Ubari (interview).
[43]Interview with a Tuareg mother, Fezzan, 2024. Translated from Arabic by the author. The children have not been registered in any civil registry — local or national — and no birth certificates have been issued for them. Their admission to school depends entirely on the personal discretion of the headteacher; no legal entitlement to enrolment exists without civil documentation. The participant’s anxiety about middle school reflects the correct assessment that informal administrative tolerance, where it exists at primary level, does not extend to the formal examination and certification system at secondary level, which requires a national ID number.
[44]Participant MI, Ubari (interview, 2022–2024). Woman born Tripoli 1979, stateless.
[45]Participant IM, Sebha (interview); Participant MI, Ubari (interview).
[46]Participants AI (Ubari), MI (Ubari), MA (Tripoli), IM (Sebha), interviews conducted 2022–2024.
[47]Interview with a Tuareg man, Fezzan, 2023–2024. Translated from Arabic by the author. [Author note: confirm before submission whether the father’s pension loss and participant’s disability are from the same interview or separate participants, and update attribution accordingly.] The thirty-five-year public service record places the father’s original employment in the Gaddafi-era state apparatus, during which period Tuareg civil servants were routinely registered without full nationality documentation.
[48]Interview with a Tuareg man, Fezzan, 2023–2024. Translated from Arabic by the author. The participant served in the Libyan public sector for thirty-five years and lost his pension following cancellation of his national identification number under the post-2013 NIN system. His thirty-five years of service places his original employment in the Gaddafi-era state, during which period Tuareg civil servants were routinely engaged without confirmed nationality documentation. He is the father of the participant cited in footnote 62, interviewed separately.
[49]Interview with a young Tuareg woman, Fezzan, 2024–2025. Translated from Arabic by the author. The participant graduated at the top of her class but was unable to pursue postgraduate study or specialist training due to the national number requirement at universities in northern Libya. The administrative number (al-raqm al-idari) was introduced as a partial measure under Law No. 8 of 2014, Art. 8, but she learned of its acceptance only after the relevant application windows had closed. The welfare allowance she references — designated for wives and daughters over eighteen — is a Libyan state benefit requiring a valid national number for application, to which she is ineligible despite being the intended beneficiary. The original Arabic is recorded in field notes and available to reviewers on request. Note: the speaker uses masculine verb forms in Libyan Arabic colloquial convention; attribution as female is confirmed by the researcher.
[50]Lacher, W. (2014). Libya’s Fractious South: Insecurity and Governance Vacuum. Small Arms Survey Dispatch No. 3. Geneva: Small Arms Survey. Confirms Tuareg recruitment with citizenship promises. On the 1,722 citizenship grants: Libyan General People’s Committee, Resolution No. 328 of 1377/2009 [Arabic: قرار رقم 328 لسنة 1377 و.ر بالموافقة على منح الجنسية العربية الليبية لبعض الأشخاص], issued 28 Rajab 1377/2009. Six family registers (kawashif): Kashf 1 (707 persons), Kashf 2 (840 persons), Kashf 3 (83 persons), Kashf 4 (59 persons), Kashf 5 (25 persons), Kashf 6 (8 persons). Total: 1,722 individuals. Primary document held by author.
[51]Participant MZ, Lyon (interview): formerly stateless, served in Khamis Brigade, fled Libya 2011. Participant AB, Tunis (interview): Libyan national, served in Khamis Brigade, now resident Tunis. Personal knowledge of researcher.
[52]Community knowledge, Fezzan. No official Libyan state document confirms this figure; the absence of official data on military composition by ethnicity is itself politically significant.
[53]Participant MZ, Lyon (interview); Participant AB, Tunis (interview); Lacher, W. (2014). Libya’s Fractious South, p. 4: hundreds of Tuareg soldiers deserted and returned to areas of origin in the final months of the 2011 war.
[54]Human Rights Watch (2011). Libya: Stop Arbitrary Arrests of Black Africans. 4 September 2011. Available at: hrw.org. Lacher (2014) confirms multi-ethnic composition of Gaddafi’s military apparatus.
[55]Minority Rights Group International (2022). Tuareg in Libya. London: MRG; US Department of State (2021). Libya 2021 Human Rights Report.
[56]International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). UN General Assembly Resolution 2200A (XXI), Art. 2 (non-discrimination); UNHCR (2018). Libya Statelessness Report. Geneva: UNHCR.
[57]Intelligence Directorate (Istikhbarat), recruitment announcement, join date 1 January 2026. Requirements include electronic birth certificate, residency certificate, personal ID card or passport (as alternatives), criminal record certificate, and Libyan nationality. The passport-as-alternative provision is formally listed but inaccessible in practice: obtaining a Libyan passport itself requires a NIN, which stateless persons cannot obtain.
[58]Libyan Arab Armed Forces, Ground Forces Command, Battalion 101 Infantry recruitment announcement, 2025–2026. This document is notable for explicitly listing the national number (al-Raqm al-Watani) as a recruitment requirement — the same requirement that blocks access to banking, employment, and civil services. The Special Forces Command recruitment announcement (2025–2026) similarly lists Libyan nationality and personal ID or passport as requirements.
[59]Libyan General People’s Committee, Decision No. 27 of 1377/2009. The decision formed a committee specifically to review nationality applications from Tuareg who were already employed in military and security services at the time of issuance. The plain meaning of this provision is that stateless Tuareg individuals had been recruited into active military and security service prior to possessing confirmed legal nationality — the very status the formal 2025–2026 recruitment announcements cite as a prerequisite.
[60]The asymmetry of enforcement is structurally significant. A Libyan bank rejects an account application immediately and definitively upon absence of a national number. The military’s operational recruitment in the south, particularly through informal militia structures and tribal networks, operates without equivalent bureaucratic rigidity. The formal announcement requirements and the ground-level recruitment reality diverge in proportion to the state’s need for personnel in peripheral, high-risk environments.
[61]The coexistence of anti-Tuareg protests in Libyan cities — calling for deportation on grounds of alleged foreignness — with the simultaneous deployment of Tuareg soldiers to guard those same cities’ borders and southern approaches encapsulates the central contradiction documented in this article. The state and segments of its urban population treat the Tuareg as foreign when it comes to rights and as Libyan when it comes to obligations. This is not a paradox to be resolved but a structure to be named.
[62]Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191; Farmer, P. (2004). An Anthropology of Structural Violence. Current Anthropology, 45(3), 305–325.
[63]Chatham House (2025). How Migrant Smuggling Has Fuelled Conflict in Libya. London: Chatham House; Lacher, W. (2014). Libya’s Fractious South.
[64]UNHCR (2018). Libya Statelessness Report; Participant MA, Tripoli (interview); Participant AI, Ubari (interview).
[65]Participant MZ, Lyon (interview); Participant AB, Tunis (interview); Lacher, W. (2014); Libyan General People’s Committee, Resolution No. 328 of 2009.
