"The problem is deeper than we thought. Bigger than a regime." Ahmed Elbokhari's central argument in EP 12 was that Libya's dysfunction is social, not political.
Ahmed's position: changing the ruler changes nothing if the social contract remains intact. Tribalism, conformity, collective intolerance, the reflexive punishment of difference — these structures predate Gaddafi and will outlast any government. A revolution that replaces a dictator but preserves the social machinery that produced him has not actually succeeded.
The political system is a symptom. The disease is social.
This was not pessimism. Ahmed framed it as diagnosis. If you treat the wrong illness, the patient does not recover — and you waste the treatment. Libya had spent years debating constitutions, elections, and political structures while the deeper problem — how Libyans relate to each other, to difference, to dissent — went unaddressed.
Ahmed co-founded Harakat Tanweer (the Enlightenment Movement), a cultural and intellectual initiative. The movement's logic follows directly from this diagnosis: if the problem is social, the solution must be social too. Not elections. Not constitutions. Culture. Education. Literature. The slow, unglamorous work of changing how people think.
This idea — that the revolution failed not because it chose the wrong leaders but because it left the social foundation untouched — is one of the most significant intellectual positions in the Damiri archive. It reframes the entire post-2011 Libyan experience: not as a political failure but as a social one.