Bangladesh, Jan. 31 -- More than a decade after NATOs 2011 intervention, Libya remains the most misunderstood state on the Mediterranean. To outside observers, the country appears terminally fractured: rival governments, competing militias, contested borders, and a diplomatic process that seems permanently stuck in neutral. Yet this surface-level chaos conceals a deeper and more uncomfortable truth. Libya did not collapse in the way many predicted. It survives-not through political unity or democratic consensus, but through a strange, durable paradox in which essential state functions persist despite the absence of a sovereign political center.

This is Libyas defining irony. The state has been politically decapitated, but its financial a...