Episode: 132 — "How to Build Strong Relationships — Al-Hareth Al-Shibani" · Full Episode #132
Language: Arabic, with English code-switching
Al-Hareth Al-Shibani (الحارث الشيباني) is a young Libyan international relations and project management specialist. He is a Chevening Scholar — a recipient of the UK government's flagship international scholarship — and the founder and director of the Libyan Development Program, which has trained 845 young Libyans across 48 cities in project management, leadership, and applied skills. He is based primarily in the UK with regular periods in Libya.
Al-Hareth has lived in the UK across three distinct periods. He arrived first as a child, between the ages of four and seven, while his father was studying. He returned again in 2009 and stayed through 2017 for secondary and university study. He came back a third time in 2020 and has been based there since. The three arrivals are different in kind: the child who did not know he was being formed, the teenager and student who registered the cultural difference and was sometimes alienated by it, and the working adult who returned with a project and a network.
He describes himself, with deliberate self-irony, as a dakhīl (دخيل) — an intruder, an outsider, someone who arrived from outside the system. The word is loaded in Libyan Arabic. He uses it to name the discomfort of moving between Tripoli and London and never being fully read as native in either, and to refuse the alternative of pretending the discomfort is not there.
He founded the Libyan Development Program as a structured response to a specific deficit. Young Libyans coming out of the university system carried strong credentials in their stated discipline and very little practical training in project management, applied leadership, or the soft architecture that allows a project to survive contact with reality. The programme runs intensive applied training across 48 Libyan cities and has put 845 trainees through. The reach across cities is deliberate: most Libyan training initiatives concentrate in Tripoli and Benghazi, which reproduces the centralisation pattern the programme is supposed to disrupt.
Al-Hareth and Tariq met by accident on Lake Como. Both were in the area for separate reasons. The accidental conversation surfaced an overlap between Tariq's media work and Al-Hareth's training organisation, and the meeting evolved into a sponsorship: Hive Space, the workspace infrastructure Al-Hareth was building in parallel with the development programme, became a sponsor for Damiri's Season 9. The accident is part of the story he tells about the value of being physically present where strangers can collide. The episode's framing of relationship-building leans on the Lake Como example: the most consequential introductions are not engineered through LinkedIn.
See: Lake Como
His Chevening scholarship placed him inside the UK government's structured programme for emerging leaders. He spoke about the network effect of the scholarship as the deliverable that matters most — the master's degree is paid for, but the alumni network is the asset that compounds over the decades following.
The episode's most direct passage is his use of dakhīl — outsider, intruder — to describe his own positioning. He is Libyan by family and by passport. He is British-formed across three life stages. He runs a Libyan programme from the UK and a UK programme inside Libya. The standard categories — diaspora, native, returnee — do not capture the actual shape of the life. Dakhīl names the gap.
"I'm a dakhīl." (EP 132)