Abstract
I recently participated in the study day on Libya organized by a French Institute de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC), based in Tunis. I presented a short paper critical of mainstream Western works on Libya in the fields of social sciences in general and political science in particular. In the paper, based on a preliminary survey and part of an ongoing research, I argued that mainstream Western studies on Libya after 2011 do not differ in terms of premises, topics, and perhaps also in objectives from those published during Gaddafi era before 2011. The basic idea presented by the paper is that mainstream Western studies on Libya do not depart from the limits and approaches of Orientalism and exceptionalism that portray Arab and Muslim societies as lagging behind modern civilization and only know tribe and religion, and are fragmented, and therefore live in division and conflict. Libya in this regard is nothing but a tribal society that has no state and is forced to conflict and must adopt Western approaches to everything in order to get rid of its current crisis.