In 533, Justinian I ordered the conquest of the former Roman provinces of Africa, which had been lost to the Vandals a century earlier. The 'reconquest' has been regarded, by contemporaries and modern scholars alike, as one of the defining successes of the reign. However, despite the evident achievements of the campaign, Roman victory over the Vandals marked little more than the beginning of the Eastern Roman Empire's attempt to consolidate its position in Africa. The unanticipated threat posed by hostilities from the Berber tribes would continue until 548. Roman-Berber relations, unlike other aspects of Justinian's foreign relations, have received comparatively little attention, and this study aims to reassess the establishment of Roman authority in Africa and the Eastern Roman Empire's response to the Berber threat. In particular, it considers whether this response should be seen as a series of ad hoc reactions to immediate circumstances, or whether it is possible to identify a coherent Roman policy vis-à-vis the Berbers. The major conclusions of this study fall in two areas. First, it argues that Roman objectives in Africa were far more limited than has generally been supposed, with the empire's territorial ambitions not extending beyond key coastal positions which offered strategic and commercial advantages, and from which the empire could project its limited authority into the interior. Second, this study concludes that the Eastern Roman Empire's actions with respect to the Berber tribes lacked coherence. Attempts to implement a system of client rulers were unsuccessful, partly as a result of the competition between individual Berber leaders as they sought to establish independent polities within the frontiers of the former Roman Empire; and partly as a result of an increasing lack of resources, as well as the instability caused by constantly changing leadership within the African civil and military administrations, which prevented the development of coherent long term strategies for addressing the Berber threat.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the nature of code switching between Tamazight and Arabic in light of Myers-Scotton's Matrix Frame Model (MLF) (Myers- Scotton, 1993), and the 4-M model of code switching (Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000). Data come from the very first Libyan Tamazight news broadcast in Libya on May 2, 2011, during the uprising against the Gaddafi regime. I analyzed the broadcast in an attempt to understand the nature and implications of the switching between the two languages in the utterances of the speakers in the video. I also argued that in many ways what many might think of as code switching is actually borrowing. During the Gaddafi era, the government banned the use of Tamazight in formal settings such as the media, work place, and schools. Since the fall of Gaddafi and his regime, the Imazighen (or Berbers) in Libya have sought to present themselves, their language, and their culture as an important part of Libyan culture. Libya's Imazighen are bilingual speakers, a fact that set up the conditions for the switching between Tamazight and Arabic analyzed in this study. Their bilingualism, along with Libyan language policies under Gaddafi, help account for the nature of code switching in the data. This study documents contact phenomena among different languages in Libya. It also facilitates understanding of some of the sociolinguistic changes occurring there as a result of the political changes in the wake of so-called "Arab Spring."