Algeria is continuing to bring its historic diplomatic weight to bear on international attempts to stabilize Libya. However, despite Algeria's best efforts, the supply of international arms and fighters to Libya's warring parties continues apace, with the international community locked inside a venomous circle of accusation and counter-accusation.

After a period of relative absence, Algeria is keen to regain its role as a leader within the region's tangled political networks. Bolstered by the election of its new president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, in December, Algiers has been striving to reassert its presence in efforts to bring Libya’s warring parties together and stem the growing presence of proxy forces massing beyond Algeria's eastern border.

From its experience as a French colony, through its brutal war for independence onward, Algeria has maintained a dogged fixation with the primacy of sovereignty and the dangers of intervention in other country’s affairs, concerns it has consistently seen ignored in Libya, from NATO’s intervention in 2011 to the chaos of the present.

“Algeria has a strong ideological commitment against any form of foreign interference in its own and in regional affairs,” Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa Project director for the Crisis Group, told Al-Monitor. “This is backed up by how badly foreign military interventions have gone over the past years, with 2011 in Libya being a strong example of the negative repercussions. This kind of event has only reinforced Algeria's perception that foreign states can only make the conflict worse by intervening directly.”