Fathi Ben Khalifa is the principal Libyan Berber political and cultural leader of the post-2011 period and the founding president of the World Amazigh Congress (Congrès Mondial Amazigh, CMA) from 2008 to 2011. He was born in 1948 in Zuwara, the Berber-speaking coastal town of northwestern Libya, and was educated in Libya, Egypt, and the United States across the 1960s and 1970s.
His political career emerged from the underground Berber-rights movement of late-Gaddafi-era Libya, where the public expression of Berber identity was effectively prohibited from the 1969 revolution onwards. He was forced into exile in the early 1980s under the cumulative pressure of state harassment and lived for extended periods in the Netherlands, Norway, and the broader European Berber-diasporic networks.
His leadership of the World Amazigh Congress — the principal international representative body for Berber communities and rights, founded in 1995 — placed him at the centre of the cross-Maghrebi Amazigh-political coordination of the late 2000s. He returned to Libya in early 2011 in the immediate aftermath of the uprising and was a principal political figure in the Berber-organised western front of the war from his home town of Zuwara.
The post-Gaddafi period saw him assume leadership of the Libyan Amazigh High Council, the principal community institution coordinating Berber-rights advocacy across the post-2011 Libyan transitions. The continuing struggle for constitutional recognition of Berber as a Libyan national language — repeatedly proposed in successive constitutional drafts since 2012 and not yet formalised — has been the principal focus of his political work, alongside the broader effort to consolidate Berber-language teaching and broadcasting in the post-Gaddafi public sphere.