Qatar: From Activism to Pragmatism

Photo Credit Fanack

Qatar’s engagement in Libya over the past ten years has been all but coherent with it being one of the first Arab nations together with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to support the NATO-led effort to first protect civilians and then topple the Gaddafi regime. Overall, Qatar’s changing role in Libya has been guided by the same ideational vision of overcoming authoritarianism in the Arab world but has witnessed different strategies being used over the years to support this vision. While between 2011 and 2014 Qatar played an active role shaping the conflict on the ground through direct support to a variety of nascent actors, Doha effectively withdrew from the conflict in 2014 to re-evaluate its strategy. Qatar only returned to the conflict in 2020 to support the UN-backed process using ways and means that are profoundly more discreet from the means used in their earlier engagement in the first phases of the Libyan conflict.

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