Cyrenaica Contemporary: Politics, Identity, and Justice in Times of Transition Thomas Hüsken and Amal S. Obeidi 1 Introduction The region of Cyrenaica covers the entire eastern part of Libya, and alongside Tripolitania in the west and Fezzan in the south forms one of the three major regions of the country. Historically, Cyrenaica has been distinguished from its neighbours by its heavy reliance on a desert pastoral economy and its Arab nomadic Bedouin society (Peters, 1990). Nevertheless, Cyrenaica has played a very influential role in the cultural, political, and social formation of modern Libya. It represented the heartland of the Sanusiya order (1843–1969), was a stronghold of militant resistance against Italian colonial rule in Libya (1911–1947), and was the cultural home and political stronghold of the foundation of the Libyan monarchy under King Idris (1951–1969) (Ahram, 2019, pp. 77–78; Evans-Pritchard, 1949/1973; Hüsken, 2019, pp. 41–42). During the rule of Muammar Qadhafi (1969–2011), Cyrenaica suffered from a process of marginalization and administrative neglect (Davis, 1987; Vandewalle, 2006), partly due to the reluctance of traditional authorities to accept the policies of Qadhafi, and more explicitly because of the resistance of oppositional forces mainly with Islamist backgrounds (Pargeter, 2008; Fitzgerald, 2015). In addition, the mismatch between the rich oil reserves of the region and the lack of redistribution of this wealth in Cyrenaica led to collective feelings of marginalization and mistrust regarding economic policies in the era of Qadhafi (St. John, 2008). In 2011, Cyrenaica became the flashpoint of the revolutionary upheaval against Qadhafi (Hüsken, 2011, 2012). However, for the people of Cyrenaica, this engage- ment has not resulted in an enhancement of their political position within Libya. The toppling of Qadhafi did not lead to significant changes in the alleged or de facto political asymmetry between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (Ahram, 2019). Against the background of the civil war in Libya, Cyrenaica has been characterized as the T. Hüsken (*) · A. S. Obeidi Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Neubert et al. (eds.), Local Self-Governance and Varieties of Statehood, Contributions to Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14996-2_9 177