Data update: Correction of government actors published in ACLED’s Libya dataset

On 29 September 2025, ACLED published corrections to revise Libya’s government actors. Normally, ACLED codes a single government actor per country. Due to Libya’s unique post-2011 political trajectory, parallel government actors are exceptionally coded to reflect the country’s east-west institutional divide. 

Corrections to the data include:

1. Revisions to data spanning 2014-present to align actors with widely recognized reporting.
2. Standardizations of actor names for clarity and consistency (see Table 2 below).
3. Corrections to interaction codes and Brigade/Armed group names (see Table 2 below). 

These changes ensure that ACLED data in Libya better represent the political bifurcation that underpins conflict dynamics in the country. 

Historical context

After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, Libya’s government was led by the National Transitional Council (NTC) in 2011-2012 and then by the General National Congress (GNC) in 2012-2014. In June 2014, elections created the House of Representatives (HoR) to replace the GNC. The GNC refused to cede power, however, resulting in two rival governments:

1. West (Tripoli): The General National Congress (GNC) transitioned into the National Salvation Government (NSG) in 2014. It was later replaced by the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in 2015, and then the Government of National Unity (GNU) in March 2021.
2. East (Tobruk / Benghazi / al-Bayda): House of Representatives (HoR) backed by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA). This structure transitioned into the Government of National Stability (GNS) in March 2022. 

From 2014 onwards, the institutional split in Libya has been reinforced by competing foreign sponsors and parallel institutions,¹ with the LNA (and GNS) controlling much of the east and south, and the GNA (and later GNU) controlling Tripoli and nominally the northwest of Libya.

This framework underpins the way ACLED codes government and state forces actors in Libya. This includes not only the government actors listed in the table below but also their affiliated military, police, border guard, and security units. Each regime shift generated corresponding changes in the naming conventions of these state force actors to align with the de facto authority they operated under. While only top-level government actors are displayed here for clarity, the same naming conventions are applied consistently across all related actors. 

Table 1: Government and state force actors, as coded in ACLED data, by region, and timeline²

Additionally, the following actors were corrected with updated interaction codes or more precise naming conventions: 

Table 2: Actor name corrections