New York- My fieldwork among the Amazigh rebels in the Jebel Nafusa region of Libya’s Tripolitania region who were then in armed revolt against the regime of Mu’ammar al-Qadaffi in mid-2011 was cited by the University of Texas Press at Austin. The work is titled Amazigh Politics in the Wake of the Arab Spring and authored by Bruce Maddy-Weitzman.
At the time, I worked for a small D.C. think-tank called the Jamestown Foundation and was roving around the width and breadth of the MENA region exploring what was being widely referred to as the ‘Arab Spring.’ I was simultaneously reporting on the ground while editing journal articles from a global network of analysts for a niche publication covering the terror wars. While I had initially worked in eastern Libya’s Cyrenaica region like hordes of other journalists covering a largely ethnic-Arab uprising with sub-Saharan participants, the fight in the country’s west was markedly different in that it lacked the ‘Arab’ element of the ‘Spring,’ for it was being fought by the indigenous Amazigh peoples whose territory spans across the vast Sahara all the way to Morocco and down into the Sahel in the arid upper reaches of rapidly desertifying west Africa. The Amazigh are of course far more commonly known by the exonym Berber but as I was writing for a think-tank coupled with believing that indigenous peoples should be referred to by their respective endonyms, for my purposes I refer to them by their strongly preferred Amazigh.
For the Amazigh, this was not simply a revolution to overthrow Africa’s then longest serving dictatorship, but also an ethno-nationalist movement aimed at shoring up the rights of north Africa’s native inhabitants in the face of Arab hegemony over this complex region. Like the Kurds of greater Kurdistan, the Amazigh liberation movement was transnational in nature while representing a people without a state of their own. It also belied the oversimplified notion that the Arab Spring was a movement in homogenous Arab or Arabic-speaking societies. As in the case of Syria where I would report from for many years after where Kurds, Syriacs and Assyrians were distinct ethnic groups with their own very much not Arabic languages, the Amazigh i encountered spoke Tamazight that was not intelligible whatsoever to Arabic speakers. In other words I was essentially lost while sitting amongst the rebels unless they switched to Arabic as a courtesy to an outsider.
This work by Professor Maddy-Weitzman actually came out 2.5 years ago but I only just became aware of here in early 2025. Happy to know more of my work in the terror wars/Arab-majority revolutions still lives and breathes. I went to great personal risk to conduct fieldwork in a place of sudden, kinetic violence.