Federalists in Cyrenaica are publicly maintaining a hard line in their seven-month stand-off with the central government. Negotiations have stalled, and a sense of crisis pervades every part of Libya’s transitional institutions, but military options to retake the terminals – although discussed – seem remote. The high-risk strategy being promoted by the main federalist grouping behind the blockades, the Political Bureau of Cyrenaica (PBC), is to push for the failure of the current transitional institutions in the hope of claiming the right to self-determination and to sell oil independently in the ensuing vacuum.