Libya’s fragile political clock stalled again in 2025, with the High National Elections Commission and the United Nations urging sequential, technical steps while national polls remain contingent on security, funding and legal fixes. Municipal ballots and piecemeal local contests have continued, but the path to credible presidential and parliamentary elections is repeatedly delayed as rival elites and armed actors exploit institutional ambiguity to consolidate power.
That political vacuum has a direct security consequence. The same forces that benefit from postponement are investing in hardware and force posture rather than in political compromise. Recent reporting documents major new supply initiatives to eastern Libyan commanders, underscoring how foreign partnerships and permissive flows have allowed rival formations to bulk up in ways that will complicate any future political settlement.
At the multilateral level the Security Council has repeatedly renewed and revised measures intended to limit arms transfers to Libya, including inspections at sea and a continued mandate for the Panel of Experts. Those instruments remain important but insufficient when implementation is fragmented and enforcement is uneven. The UN’s own authorisations create legal tools for interdiction, yet the operational gap between mandate and interdiction persists.
Independent monitoring and expert assessments have signalled the same pattern: an embargo that is formally in place but functionally porous. Public reporting by the Panel of Experts and other investigations have characterised the arms embargo as widely violated, with external actors and intermediaries using maritime, aerial and commercial channels to move materiel into Libya and to adjacent markets. That mixture of overt and covert transfers has allowed stockpiles of small arms, precision munitions, vehicles and aerial systems to grow in pockets across the country.
Local conditions incentivise the accumulation and retention of weapons. Illicit rents from state-adjacent economies, notably fuel swaps and smuggling networks that emerged after 2022, created revenue streams that armed groups and patronage networks have used to procure materiel and sustain fighters. Investigations into these markets show state capture, corruption and cross-border sales have turned trafficking into a funding mechanism for militarised actors. The result is not simply more guns, but better armed and more autonomous non-state forces.
Humanitarian and stabilization actors warn that insecure stockpiles and poor ammunition management present a persistent risk to civilians and to any future disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration effort. Agencies working on weapons and ammunition management identify unsafe storage, weak chain of custody and the reuse of explosive ordnance as obstacles that will lengthen and increase the cost of any transition to unified security institutions.
The strategic logic is simple and durable. When elections are postponed or clouded by legal dispute and insecurity, the incentives to hold land and capacity by force strengthen. Armed groups that fear being marginalised or prosecuted prefer to entrench themselves, and external patrons find leverage by supplying capabilities that lock their local partners into dependency and continued competition. Over time that dynamic hardens military balances inside Libya, raising the transaction costs of future unification and making negotiated settlement harder to achieve.
Policy responses need to be integrated and long term. Short, tactical interdictions at sea will remain necessary, but they must be paired with vigorous measures against the financial and logistical networks underwriting procurement. That means stronger oversight of fuel and commodity flows, targeted sanctions against intermediaries, capacity-building for weapons and ammunition management, and conditional assistance tied to verifiable security sector reforms. It also requires the international community to accept that good governance and credible elections are not exclusively electoral problems; they are the product of security consolidation and economic transparency.
Finally, Libyan actors and external partners must confront a painful trade-off. Military accumulation can deliver short-term leverage but it corrodes state legitimacy and amplifies the risk of renewed large-scale violence. Without decisive international coordination that reduces supply, clamps down on illicit finance, and supports institution building on the ground, a delayed electoral timetable will simply become a runway for continued militarisation. The longer that runway remains open, the higher the bar for any peaceful, civilian-led transition in Libya.