This article questions dominant analyses about Libya’s present ‘war economy’ and ‘statelessness’, which are often deployed to explain the country’s ongoing destruction. By reinterpreting the history of the past as the failure of Libya to implement neoliberal reforms, these accounts trivialise its anti-imperialist history. The article reflects on the role that war and militarism play in the US-led imperialist structure, tracing the gradual unmaking of Libya from the progressive revolutionary era, towards its transformation into a comprador state and an outpost for global class war. In doing so, it moves the focus away from Libya’s ‘war economy’ to examine the war and the economy, linking Libya’s fate to the geo-economic and geopolitical forces at the core of US-led imperialism.

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When examining the issue of human smuggling and its facilitating practises, mainstream ir analyses emphasize its criminal and illegal aspects. Such securocratic interpretations, largely mirroring EU concerns over migration, have managed to crowd-out alternative explanations of this phenomenon, detaching it from issues of capital and class. Drawing on fieldwork and secondary sources, this paper argues that people’s involvement in the facilitation of human smuggling in Tunisia has emerged because of the increasing precariousness of labor and life. Precarity, however, is not the result of weak and failing institutions; rather it should be understood in relation to the subordinate integration of Tunisia into the global neoliberal economy. In such a context, the EU’s insistence on policies based on border security and free-trade agreements securitises the lives of the poor to serve wealthy regional and European elites, thus furthering neoliberal governance in North Africa.