Digital Intimacy and Violence in Contemporary Libya

This chapter examines digital intimacy and violence in urban Libya during the past decade (2011–2021). It explores practices of in-app chatting, texting, phone calls, and social media video creation, all of which have become even more vital in a period characterized by war-impelled displacement and long periods indoors due to both conflict and COVID-19. These platforms and habits of daily life illustrate how the modes, conditions, and politics of forming intimate relationships in and outside of Libya have changed concurrently with the past decade’s war and its attendant processes of increased militarization and widespread traumatization. While young people have looked in particular to the social norm of marriage as a way of imagining security, the continuation of life, and a future beyond the ongoing conflict, whether in or outside of Libya, they have also negotiated the encroachment of the war into the intimate spheres of their lives, including the avenues by which they seek a potential partner, the grounds on which they obtain broader familial agreement, and the gendered traumas that shape their relationships.