More than a decade after NATO’s 2011 intervention, Libya remains the most misunderstood state on the Mediterranean. To outside observers, the country appears terminally fractured: rival governments, competing militias, contested borders, and a diplomatic process that seems permanently stuck in neutral. Yet this surface-level chaos conceals a deeper and more uncomfortable truth. Libya did not collapse in the way many predicted. It survives-not through political unity or democratic consensus, but through a strange, durable paradox in which essential state functions persist despite the absence of a sovereign political center.

This is Libya’s defining irony. The state has been politically decapitated, but its financial and legal nervous system continues to function. What exists today is not a failed state in the classical sense, but a “functioning paradox”: a country held together by institutions that refuse to die, social bonds that ignore political borders, and a population that continues to live as one nation while its elites negotiate separation in courtrooms and foreign capitals.

Libya’s survival rests on what can best be described as a tripod of resilience: the Central Bank of Libya (CBL), the National Oil Corporation (NOC), and the judiciary. Each of these institutions operates across factional lines, and together they form the minimum scaffolding required to keep the country from imploding.

The Central Bank remains the single most important stabilizing force in Libya. Despite years of political division between Tripoli and the east, the CBL has continued to function as the country’s sole national treasury. All oil revenues flow into it, and from it come the public salaries that sustain millions of Libyans-regardless of which side of the conflict they live on. No faction has dared to destroy this arrangement, because doing so would immediately collapse the patronage networks and social stability on which they themselves depend.

The appointment of Governor Naji Issa in 2024 marked a rare moment of institutional reconciliation. For the first time in nearly a decade, the........

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