Mary Fitzgerald

Researching Libya with eye on wider Euro-Mediterranean. Creator of @Euresilience. Mediterraneanist/Migrant/Europhile European. @EYL40 maryinlibya@gmail.com

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Book Recommendations:

MF

Recommended by Mary Fitzgerald

Interesting interview with Libyan scholar Ali Abdullatif Ahmida about his new book on the Italian colonial occupation. The book is causing a stir in Libya and this interview has been translated & published in a number of Libyan outlets. https://t.co/SffUGhIsEI (from X)

Genocide in Libya book cover

by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida·You?

Winner of the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies 2022 This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929–1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. This book links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence. Based on the survivors’ testimonies, which took over ten years of fieldwork and research to document, this new and original history of the genocide is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.

MF

Recommended by Mary Fitzgerald

@JMJalel_H @GuttmannAviva A little documented episode in general - and now many of the key figures on both the Libyan and Irish side are dead - but Ed Moloney’s book A Secret History of the IRA is useful. Some interesting material has appeared in Irish and British State Papers released in recent years. (from X)

For decades, the British and Irish had 'got used to' a situation without parallel in Europe: a cold, ferocious, persistent campaign of bombing and terror of extraordinary duration and inventiveness. At the heart of that campaign lies one man: Gerry Adams. From the outbreak of the troubles to the present day, he has been an immensely influential figure. The most compelling question about the IRA is: how did a man who condoned atrocities that resulted in huge numbers of civilian deaths also become the guiding light behind the peace process? Moloney's book is now updated to encompass the anxious and uneasy peace that has prevailed to 2007.