Risk prioritization in Libyan construction projects using FAHP: political and financial drivers in a fragile environment

Construction projects in fragile and conflict‑affected states are highly exposed to political instability, financial volatility, and institutional weaknesses, resulting in persistent cost overruns, delays, and project cancellations. Libya exemplifies this context, where post‑2011 disruptions, inflation, and fragmented governance have severely undermined the performance of the construction sector. This study aims to systematically identify and prioritize the principal risks affecting Libyan construction projects, with a specific focus on political and financial drivers.​ A fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) framework was developed to handle expert subjectivity and data scarcity by converting linguistic assessments into quantitative weights. Empirical data were collected from four senior Libyan professionals with 20–25 years of experience using structured pairwise-comparison questionnaires. Thirty one sub-risks were grouped into six categories: political, financial, legal, social, environmental, and supply‑chain, and evaluated using triangular fuzzy numbers, geometric mean aggregation, and defuzzification.​ The results show that political (37.89%) and financial (29.73%) risks are the most influential, while legal, environmental, supply‑chain, and social risks have secondary but non-negligible effects. These findings highlight unstable governance, corruption, inflation, and delayed payments as primary drivers of project underperformance. The proposed FAHP-based framework offers a practical decision-support tool for policymakers and practitioners to target mitigation efforts and can be adapted to other fragile construction environments.