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1. Introduction
The areas south of Libya have experienced more than their fair share of conflict and rapid social change. In earlier times, the main routes of trade, commerce and pilgrimage between West African and the Arab Peninsula passed through this region, also once inhabited by mighty warrior empires (see for example Bawuro 1972). However, as the empires along these routes faded away, and international ocean shipping opened up this part of Africa to the forces of global trade and capitalism, the centres of authority that once controlled this region also vanished. What remained was an almost open territory: unwelcoming and hard, but also a place of possibilities and the freedom to roam for those who had mastered the art of survival under such difficult conditions. This was the land of the Tuareg and other semi-nomadic groups who controlled cities and important trading posts such as Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal in contemporary Mali. This is the world of the Sahel and the parts of Western Africa that straddles Libya, and a region that currently includes Southern Algeria, Northern Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania and parts of Northern Nigeria. These are therefore also the countries and areas that have come to experience the full effect of what we define as post-Gaddafi repercussions.
2. Gaddafi and the Sahel/West Africa
How can we speak of such a thing as post-Gaddafi repercussions, may well be asked? A dictator is gone, and not just any dictator, but a source of regional and global instability who used his oil wealth to support all kinds of rebel movements around the world; from trafficking weapons, to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), to establishing training camps for warlords such as Liberia's Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone's Foday Sankoh. Gaddafi was a man who on more than one occasion went to war against Chad to claim the Aozou Strip in the North on the border with Libya (see St John 2011 ). This is one part of the Gaddafi legacy we do not deny, and we are neither trying to revise his international image. However, we also claim that in his later years Gaddafi's Libya was much less a source of regional instability. In fact, increasingly, it had become not only a bastion of stability in...