Yemen in the Shadow of Transition

A new book with a refreshing and incisive reconceptualization of Yemen's war(s)

Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (Hurst/Oxford, 2023).

There have been some really good books on Yemen’s war and humanitarian catastrophe over the last few years: Helen Lackner’s Yemen: Poverty and Conflict; Laurent Bonnefoy’s Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity; Marieke Brandt’s Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict; the remarkable oral history What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari. Stacey Philbrick Yadav’s theoretically innovative, deeply researched and wonderfully written Yemen in the Shadow of Transition is a welcome addition to that small but powerful bookshelf. By centering questions of justice and looking deeply into historical processes of identity contestation, Yadav offers a compelling reading of Yemeni politics which challenges much of the conventional wisdom about the war.

I spoke with Yadav about her book on this week’s podcast. Listen here:

One of the first things which gripped me in Yadav’s book was her insistence on embedding the 2015 Saudi intervention into a much longer history of conflict and contestation. I’ve been working for several years on a project focused on Middle Eastern “warscapes” which attempts to theorize these long-running conflicts which have no clear beginnings or endings, where violence is intermittent and spatially diverse, and where conflict ecologies shape and reshape identities, economies, social norms, and political power. Yemen, Yadav reminds us, clearly fits within such a model. Claims that the war began in 2015 with the Saudi intervention, or even in 2014 with the Houthi takeover, tend to elide the violence of the post-2011 transition. They also tend to look past the six rounds of ever more violent war between the government of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthis between 2004-2010, and the US drone campaign and counterinsurgent campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula over the same decade. From the lived perspective of the Yemeni warscape (my words, not Yadav’s), clearly demarcated starting points for the war make little sense. Neither do expectations that ceasefires or even a formal end to war will mean any real ending.

A second key contribution of Yadav’s book is her conceptualization of sectarianization in the Yemeni context. She shows effectively how sectarian identities evolved and hardened through the process of conflict. In a really clever methodological move, she returns to her interview notes from research in Yemen in the 2000s with many of the actors and groups who would later populate Yemen’s war. She found remarkably few claims based on sectarian identities in those notes, or even much discussion of sect at all. Politics back then, she observes, were fought on a different terrain, around different identities and different claims. She locates the move towards sectarianization in several overlapping processes: Saleh’s wars with the Houthis, to be sure, but also aggressive proselytization by salafi Islamists both within and outside the al-Islah movement who were often trained in and supported by Saudi Arabia. She identifies similar but not identical processes in the south, where local dismay with “tribalization” and “Islamization” drove new identity formations in response. It all makes for a really clear and well-articulated empirical presentation of the increasingly popular “sectarianization” concept.

The really distinctive part of Yadav’s book is how she centers claims about justice. Here, she doesn’t only mean the formal institutions and processes of “transitional justice”, though she does discuss those in great depth. She sees justice claims from a much wider aperture, including reparative and restorative justice claims and local level initiatives moving on a different pace and responding to their own community needs. More broadly, she sees justice claims permeating and shaping the political demands of almost every movement, from the Houthis to the southern Hirak to local tribes to al-Islah. Her reading of the transitional justice portions of the much-maligned National Dialogue were quite eye-opening, showing just how far those committees got in articulating and defining paths towards transitional justice which the entrenched elite and the emergent war would never let be taken.

There’s one final point about the book worth noting. Yadav has been a pioneer in building out genuinely collaborate research networks with Yemeni scholars, working tirelessly to facilitate and incorporate these local activists, journalists, and scholars into the research and publication process. She reflects on the process extensively in the book, identifying the myriad ways in which her engagements with local activists changed her thinking and informed her research. Yadav very much puts her ideals into practice, centering Yemeni voices in her own writing and supporting them in their own knowledge production.

Yemen in the Shadow of Transition is a major contribution to our understanding of Yemen before, during and after the 2011 uprisings. It decenters many assumptions about the parties to the conflict, their motivations, their identities, and their histories. It should be required reading for those interested in Yemen. It would also make a perfect book for inclusion on undergraduate or graduate Middle East Politics syllabi spending a week on Yemen — as such courses really should.