When the liberation of Libya was celebrated on 23 October 2011, the overthrow of the Qadhafi regime was welcomed as a new beginning for Libya. The Constitutional Declaration issued by the National Transitional Council (NTC) in August 2011, which set in motion a tight roadmap for national elections, the formation of a new transitional government, and the drafting and approval of a new constitution was greeted with enthusiasm not only by the Libyan populace but also by the international community, notably by the countries calling for and leading the military intervention which contributed to the toppling of Qadhafi. An initial belief that Libyans could shepherd their country through the transition removed definitively the option of “boots on the ground” from the policy choices of Western governments: external policy-makers seemed to believe that Libya could not only “self-sustain” the cost of the transition, but also progress toward a full transition from war to peace and from dictatorship to democracy, without the assistance of foreign actors, despite their key role in bringing about the collapse of the regime. This approach led some authors to see a paradigmatic shift whereby Western powers have renounced any transformative promise and their responsibility toward the outcomes of the transition. Indeed, the grand narrative sustaining transformative changes that can be found in previous post-conflict transitional countries has been almost absent in Libya. This paper maps and traces the role of external actors in the Libyan transition. The analysis focuses on those Western governments and international organisations (UN and IFIs) whose role has had a greater impact on post-conflict statebuilding. The absence of a heavy-footprint intervention does not mean that Libya is a case of “autonomous recovery”, since external influence can be exercised at various levels and through different means. By investigating external stances towards the Libyan transition, this paper first evaluates external priorities vis-à-vis domestic dynamics and second it problematises the notion of a paradigmatic shift in international post-conflict policies.