Who Is Muammar al-Gaddafi?

The piece appeared during the second week of the Libyan civil war — protests had begun in Benghazi on February 15, 2011, the regime's response had hardened into open conflict by February 19, and February 22 fell on the day Saif al-Islam Gaddafi delivered his televised 'rivers of blood' speech and major Libyan diplomats began defecting. International coverage was scrambling to provide background on a regime that hadn't been a daily news subject in the West since the 1980s.

The biographical material the article would have compiled was well-established but scattered: the September 1969 coup against King Idris led by then-27-year-old Captain Gaddafi; the Green Book and the Jamahiriya political-theory framework that nominally replaced conventional government; the regime's role in the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing and the December 1988 Pan Am 103 / Lockerbie bombing; the post-2003 sanctions deal under which Libya had given up its WMD programme and rejoined the international system; and the post-2008 reform period that had drawn Western oil-and-gas investment back into the country.

The article belonged to a particular sub-genre of February–March 2011 international coverage — newsroom-and-think-tank-produced biographical primers on Gaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Saleh, all of whom had become daily news subjects almost simultaneously. By August 2011 Tripoli had fallen; Gaddafi was killed in October. The reference profile produced during these weeks of February became the basis for much of the subsequent academic and journalistic writing on the regime.