Almost half of Libya's population lives in Tripoli and Benghazi or their surrounding areas. Former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's regime was based in Tripoli, which is much closer to Tunisia and the Maghreb than Benghazi in Libya's east. A desert separates the two cities and makes up the majority of Libyan territory. The distance and geographic barrier between the two coastal cities allowed different regional identities to emerge in the centuries before Libya's modern borders were drawn, and these differences are at the center of the country's governance challenges. Libya's modern boundaries were established in 1934 when it became an Italian colony after Rome took control of Tripoli and Benghazi from the Ottomans. The Italians divided Libya into the western, eastern and southern administrative regions that exist today. Libya then came under British control in 1943 until declaring independence as the Kingdom of Libya in 1951. During all these periods, the powers ruling Libya understood the need to balance the competing centers of power in Tripoli and Benghazi; although Libyan King Idris hailed from Cyrenaica, he too alternated capitals between Tripoli and Benghazi to prevent a rival power base from emerging in the other city. Gadhafi's regime, founded in 1969, represented the alternative way of ruling Libya's vast and disparate desert territory: using a strong central government and authoritarian control to suppress Libya's strong regional identities. After Gadhafi's ouster in October 2011, Libyans for the first time had the opportunity to craft a political system representative of their interests instead of an imposed system of political control. Libya's ongoing political evolution represents a logical return to a system prioritizing local identities and politics over the dictates of a distant government in Tripoli. Because of this weakening of the central government, wide swathes in the center of the country are not controlled by either Tripoli or Benghazi — a situation that militant groups have been able to exploit.
