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Targeting Libya: How Canada went from building public works to bombing an oil-rich country and creating chaos for its citizens
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 6, 2025
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May 5, 2026
Do you know the story of the last time Canadian war planes dropped bombs? I didn't, and the government doesn't seem too interested in memorializing our role in the 2011 NATO regime change in Libya. In Ottawa, a public display commemorating Canadian military missions I stumbled upon left out Libya. The SNC Lavelin affair is burned in our contentiousness, but not the war that produced it. Owen Schalk makes an important intervention in the continued canadian myth of benevolence and peace keeping.
This lack of institutional and public memory is because, as this book shows, the results of this war have been disastrous. Over a decade of civil war, a significant drop in all measures of development and prosperity, and no free western elections as promised. Schalk lays out in accessible language how Libya was targeted for regime change the same way 100's of other nations have been: for not submitting completely to imperial world order. Libya provides a particularly interesting study as the country did go through a significant period of liberalization, resulting in large canadian investment, and the country actually became less exploitable post coup due to political instability. Schalk shows how the ideological threat of Ghaddafi promoting Pan-Africanism and Global South sovereignty outweighed hard money calculations in the eyes of NATO.
I also appreciated learning about the Jamahiriya system and how it practiced a unique Libyan form of democracy, far more representative and responsive than anything we could hope for in the west. May the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya live on as a testament to creative and local forms of democracy and the will of the Global South to triumph in economic and political sovereignty!
This lack of institutional and public memory is because, as this book shows, the results of this war have been disastrous. Over a decade of civil war, a significant drop in all measures of development and prosperity, and no free western elections as promised. Schalk lays out in accessible language how Libya was targeted for regime change the same way 100's of other nations have been: for not submitting completely to imperial world order. Libya provides a particularly interesting study as the country did go through a significant period of liberalization, resulting in large canadian investment, and the country actually became less exploitable post coup due to political instability. Schalk shows how the ideological threat of Ghaddafi promoting Pan-Africanism and Global South sovereignty outweighed hard money calculations in the eyes of NATO.
I also appreciated learning about the Jamahiriya system and how it practiced a unique Libyan form of democracy, far more representative and responsive than anything we could hope for in the west. May the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya live on as a testament to creative and local forms of democracy and the will of the Global South to triumph in economic and political sovereignty!
Displaying 1 of 1 review