An award winning Libyan journalist and academic, a regular feature on such international platforms as Al Jazeera English, TRT world & Press TV, Mustafa Fetouri is no stranger to the conversation on North Africa. Recounting his personal experience as both expert and Libyan in the midst of the 2011 revolution, his account exposes the flaws of pursuing good-guy-bad-guy narratives that dangerously oversimplify a complex and poorly understood part of the world. In so doing, he draws attention to some of the systemic limitations of how expertise in the West engages the region, and the disastrous consequences this can have for the people of North Africa.

At the height of war in my country, Libya, in April 2011, I was asked by a Madrid-based think-tank to write an analytical projecting outcomes. I was told I was free to say what I thought, as long as it backed up making sense of the situation. Three weeks later it was still unpublished. Why? “Your piece is great” I was told, “but my boss does not think it fits the ‘mainstream stuff’ dominating the debate about Libya.”

The “mainstream stuff”, then, was to condemn Gaddafi and everything he did – throw as much mud at him and his brand as possible. Generating an aura of evil sufficient to justify military intervention was the number one priority for many of the world’s experts, usually based in Europe and America and at a suitably safe distance from the consequences.

But while much of the world’s media cheered along the NATO-led intervention as a ‘humanitarian act’, its effects have been anything but. Since the fall of Gaddafi, my country has been torn apart by violence, failed governments, and entrenched foreign interests.

That’s not to mention the ‘collateral damage’ that accompanied the NATO-led airstrikes, escaping a truly critical eye from its proponents. If the West was to get it’s bad guys, it seemed, it was to be ordinary Libyans who paid the price.

Since 2011, the practice of selectively demonising political opponents has become routine. In the employment of foreign interests, international media decide who are to be the ‘good guys’ and who are to be ‘the bad’, and then take it from there. For the West, where Gaddafi was once the villain it is now Haftar, portrayed as a warlord and Russian-backed dictator in the making. Much less, of course, is said of his supposedly ‘democracy-loving’ opponents, despite behaviour equally reprehensible to self-professed Western values.

The danger here, as it was in 2011, is that ordinary Libyans will yet again pay the price. Demonising the ‘bad guys’ does not help the situation, but pushes hard-line, anti-conciliatory policies that further division and misery down the line. Promoting ‘the good’ amounts to nothing more than propaganda.

I started writing in English about Libya to fill a gap in expertise among Western media outlets. Until 2010 Libya was a country closed to outsiders, and it was hard to find Libyans with a deep knowledge of the country able to reach English-speaking audiences.

In 2022, much of the problem remains the same. Libya is still a country that is difficult to access, though for very different reasons. The number of experts, however, has steadily multiplied, as have those pedalling the same ‘mainstream’ narratives that misled the UNSC to rubberstamp use of force under the most vague of terms.

As political tensions deepen and the situation shows fewer and fewer signs of resolving, it is important to remember that Libya is not a career but a country. Words have consequences, and these lead to actions, by actors inside the country and out.

Incidentally in 2015, at the height of a second Libyan civil war, I ran into the same boss at a NATO-organised event. During the coffee break, I asked him why he refused to run my article. Claiming not to recall, he never did offer an explanation.

Unfortunately, it looks as if we’ll get much of the same.

Mustafa Fetouri is an award winning Libyan journalist & academic. He is a regular feature on Al Jazeera English, TRT World, Press TV & more, and a weekly contributor to Middle East Monitor and Al Monitor.