Chaos in Yemen

Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism

Isa Blumi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136941184
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Chaos in Yemen challenges recent interpretations of Yemen's complex social, political and economic transformations since unification in 1990. By offering a new perspective to the violence afflicting the larger region, it explains why the 'Abdullah 'Ali Salih regime has become the principal beneficiary of these conflicts.

Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach, the author offers an alternative understanding of what is creating discord in the Red Sea region by integrating the region's history to an interpretation of current events. In turn, by refusing to solely link Yemen to the "global struggle against Islamists," this work sheds new light on the issues policy-makers are facing in the larger Middle East. As such, this study offers an alternative perspective to Yemen's complex domestic affairs that challenge the over-emphasis on the tribe and sectarianism.

Offering an alternative set of approaches to studying societies facing new forms of state authoritarianism, this timely contribution will be of great relevance to students and scholars of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world, Conflict Resolution, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.

1
Yemen’s social pathologies beyond the strategic mainstream

Scholars have long observed that terminology meant to ascribe to the ‘Islamic world’ a specific cultural essence that is uniquely ‘different’ from the ‘modern world’ originates from the exploitative relationship established between certain European commercial powers and the rest of the world (Asad 1993). The underlying importance of these ‘taxonomies of imperialist knowledge’ is that they have served capitalist interests in harnessing indigenous social and political practices to efficiently manage overseas properties and their inhabitants. Among the methods adopted by the colonial-era ‘experts’ hired to facilitate the exploitation of overseas commercial assets was to reorientate the way ‘indigenous’ cultures mediated the daily contingencies of life in a world purportedly dominated by European capitalists. It could be argued that the so-called local characteristics deemed ‘pre-modern’, ‘traditional’, and ‘antithetical to western values’ in mainstream discussions about Yemen or the larger ‘Islamic world today’ are the products of specific ways of ‘reading’ local practices and not local essences as often assumed in the literature indebted to a deeply rooted conception of epistemology (Dirks 1992; Deringil 1997). Because these characteristics serve as the medium through which readers and television audiences are encouraged to understand the Islamic story, the fact that they are a product of a very distinct historical moment by default renders them problematic, if not outright useless, for faithfully analysing the various complexities of what is happening, for instance, in Yemen today. As the overall goal of this study is to provide an alternative set of explanations for what is happening in Yemen, such an aim is at a very basic level served by first questioning the categories used to analyse events.

In this way, journalists and scholars who invoke through ‘media speak’ and academic convention terms and concepts that are demonstrated below to be archaic colonial-era categories no longer trusted in the field of Middle Eastern studies end up losing their ability to accurately analyse the dialectal relationship between post-colonial structures of power and actual events. Often, terrible injustices result from reducing a group of ‘Muslims’ in Yemen to ‘al-Q

‘idah’. As an alternative, we must remember that these people so often labelled as ‘terrorists’ or ‘tribesmen harbouring terrorists’ are exposed, because of these loosely applied associations, to various forms of violence that results in the murder of thousands of innocent people. That is to say, whereas in the short term ‘another victory against al-Q

‘idah’ can be claimed when a cruise missile incinerates seventy people in south Yemen’s Abyan province, these assaults on innocents and ‘suspects’ alike only create a more intense local enmity that ultimately prolongs the social strife that these interventions are putatively intended to reduce.

The goal here is to free us from the deductive trap that actually leads to crude simplifications which are used to justify the arbitrary, counter-productive use of violence under the false pretext of ‘disciplining’ incorrigible tribal peoples ‘who only know the language of violence’. The best way to avoid repeating the logic that abuses stereotypes to blindly pursue often ill-informed and exploitative (hence illegal) ‘policy objectives’ is to highlight how they actually cause more problems than solve.

The reduction of complex ‘lifeworlds’ that these terms effect ultimately blinds outside observers and those so inclined inside Yemen to the constantly shifting social, political and economic conditions in people’s lives. The origins of this reductionism are the essentially imperialist epistemologies that still permeate media and scholarly lexicons. Paradoxically, the lingering presence of such discursive tools of abstraction results in the perpetuation of a rigid and limiting pattern of analysis of events in Yemen that is ultimately counter-productive.

Ironically, the subsequent refraction through the prism of this language of domination leaves those who are often mindful of the problems with using their tools of abstraction nevertheless prone to operate from a discursive point of departure that assumes there are essential qualities to Yemen. In other words, in the hands of many sympathetic scholars and journalists today, no matter how obvious the injustices and how blatant the exploitative dynamics are (and no matter how much we do not like it), Yemen’s underlying social, cultural, economic and political ‘nature’ makes it impossible to reformulate the analysis of the current situation.

This is the paradox of the Euro-American liberal sensibility: otherwise well-meaning people will often themselves tap into the well of ‘white mythologies’ when dealing with their ontological other, be they ‘starving Africans’, ‘third world women’, ‘native peoples’, or Yemeni peasants.¹ Over time, the long-acknowledged distortions of imperial-era orientalism have led even sophisticated and sympathetic outside observers studying relationships of domination through these recalcitrant systems of knowledge to uncritically and reflexively accept as indispensable the tools of analysis so prevalent in contemporary media and scholarly engagement with Yemen. The end result is that any engagement through scholarship or the media with the issues of Yemen today is mediated by powerful underlying sets of assumptions that have enabled the

regime, when evoking ‘tribal backwardness’ and ‘Sh

‘

terrorism’, to pursue its post-9/11 authoritarianism with the support of the outside world, be they neo-conservatives entrenched within the military–industrial complex or, less directly, academics and journalists.

As is explained in greater detail below, although they are heavily theorized, the reasons for this are actually few: the terminology used to analyse events in Yemen is assumed to reflect the litany of historical and cultural (if not biological) roots of indigenous social pathologies largely beyond the capacity of self-appointed ‘western’ representatives to really understand and thus address with anything more than fascination or fear. In seemingly contradictory ways, in other words, the Middle East and Yemen more specifically are at once mysteries and diagnosed as incorrigibly ‘Islamic’, ‘tribal’ and ‘traditional’, terms which do have some assumed self-explanatory weight (Tapper 1983; Trablousi 1991). It is for this reason that the underlying conclusion among many analysts is that violent suppression is the only meaningful way to cure Yemen’s, or the broader ‘Islamic world’s’, problems (Watkins 1996). Sadly, this calculus embedded in certain circles of international relations practice perfectly suites a number of regimes currently in power throughout the world.

Issues of poverty, social injustice, exploitation, structural adjustments and their impact on contemporary social orders are, as a consequence, all beyond the capacity of the current world political order to address without the cooperation of the state. For the Middle East, with all its particular social pathologies enumerated in ethnographies and political histories published over the last two centuries, state violence is thus the only means of containing the incumbent threats that go along with the manifestations of the Middle East/Islamic illness. To address the underlying dangers of allowing these patterns of association to persist, the next section deconstructs the analytical paradigms accompanying more straightforward geopolitical and journalistic engagements with Yemen today. While acknowledging that such an exercise does little to confront the many possible ‘deep politics’ dynamics at play in Yemen and its links to the interests of a global financial elite, it is nevertheless necessary to stress the possibility of beginning to under...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Yemen’s social pathologies beyond the strategic mainstream
• 2 The local scramble for ascendancy and the rise of modern polities
• 3 The contingent state
• 4 The frontier as a measure of modern state power
• 5 Unification and the roots of authoritarian push
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index