How to account for the collapse of the Libyan state? Despite the impressive displays of national unity in the 2011 uprising and the elections of 2012, no force has been able to consolidate power in post-revolutionary Libya. Indeed, almost the opposite seems to be the case: there are as many forces haphazardly pulling Libya apart as there are those ostensibly seeking to keep things together. These contradictory forces — domestic, foreign, and hybrids of the two — are struggling to create the institutions of a modern state in a context shaped by several parameters. There are the reconstituted notions of political legitimacy in the wake of the 2011 revolution, notions that involve violence, sacrifice, and the ever-vigilant defense of the polity against corrupt centralized authority. There are also the legacies of the prior apparatus (the Jamahiriyyah), including its major and minor agents, its structures, its ideational effects, and its long-exploited vulnerabilities. And, lastly, there are the social and economic bases that, first, engendered the rapid and effective formation of anti-regime militias in 2011. These bases, secondly, have since come to serve as means through which power has been radically democratized and maintained in the hands of localities and their armed defenders, the militias. To understand the emergence of these new institutional forms, revolutionary ideals, and violent practices requires an honest analysis of Gaddafi Jamahiriyyah and its evolution in several shifting geo-political and geo-economic environments. What this analysis reveals is the emergence of a strange new polity, one that exhibits telling characteristics of the Jamahiriyyah in its desperate and violent attempts to destroy its vestiges. Based on fieldwork conducted in post-revolutionary Libya and a critical re-reading of existing theorizations of the Libyan polity, this intervention will suggest pathways to a more robust account of the power struggles shaping Libya today.