Yemen is in the grip of its most severe crisis in years. The civil war between the Huthi rebels and the Western and Arab supporters of the regime has resulted in thousands killed and three million displaced. Those who remain suffer severe food shortages and a collapsed economy.

The struggle for power in the Arab world's poorest but strategically vital nation has serious implications for the region and beyond. While Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear that a Huthi takeover would threaten free passage of oil through the Bab al-Mandab strait, western governments fear a rise of attacks from al-Qa'ida and Daesh as the country becomes more unstable. Iran has also been implicated in the conflict, accused of arming the Huthis.

In this invaluable analysis, Helen Lackner uncovers the social and political conflicts that threaten the very survival of the state and its people. She reveals the corruption of the country's US-backed autocratic regime and how it failed to address national impoverishment and its limited natural resources, and to plan an equitable economy for Yemen's growing population. Lackner concludes with an assessment of the current situation and prospects for the short and medium term future of this historical region.

Helen Lackner has spent the past four decades researching Yemen, working in the country for fifteen years, and is currently the editor of the "Journal of the British-Yemeni Society". She was the 2016 Sir William Luce Fellow at Durham University and is a regular contributor to Oxford Analytica's briefs as well as to openDemocracy.

Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State

Why is Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, involved in a costly and merciless war against its mountainous southern neighbor Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East? When the Saudis attacked the hitherto obscure Houthi militia, which they believed had Iranian backing, to oust Yemen's government in 2015, they expected an easy victory. They appealed for Western help and bought weapons worth billions of dollars from Britain and America; yet two years later the Houthis, a unique Shia sect, have the upper hand.

In her revealing portrait of modern Yemen, Ginny Hill delves into its recent history, dominated by the enduring and pernicious influence of career dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled for three decades before being forced out by street protests in 2011. Saleh masterminded patronage networks that kept the state weak, allowing conflict, social inequality and terrorism to flourish. In the chaos that follows his departure, civil war and regional interference plague the country while separatist groups, Al-Qaeda and ISIS compete to exploit the broken state. And yet, Yemen endures.


Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia

Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another—links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth—then sinks into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by its tribal makeup and has become a perfect breeding ground for insurgent and terrorist movements.

Clark returns to the country where she was born to discover a perilously fragile state that deserves more of our understanding and attention. On a series of visits to Yemen between 2004 and 2009, she meets politicians, influential tribesmen, oil workers and jihadists as well as ordinary Yemenis. Untangling Yemen’s history before examining the country’s role in both al-Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement today, Clark presents a lively, clear, and up-to-date account of a little-known state whose chronic instability is increasingly engaging the general reader.

Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

Yemen's modern history is unique and deserves to be better understood. While the borders of most Middle East states were defined by colonial powers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a single Yemeni state was not formed until 1990. In fact, much of Yemen's twentieth-century history was taken up constructing such a state, forged after years of civil war. The book is augmented by illustrations, maps and a detailed chronology.

A History of Modern Yemen

Since March 2015, a Saudi-led international coalition of forces—supported by Britain and the United States—has waged devastating war in Yemen. Largely ignored by the world's media, the resulting humanitarian disaster and full scale famine threatens millions. Destroying Yemen offers the first in-depth historical account of the transnational origins of this war, placing it in the illuminating context of Yemen's relationship with major powers since the Cold War. Bringing new sources and a deep understanding to bear on Yemen's profound, unwitting imbrication in international affairs, this explosive book ultimately tells an even larger shock-doctrine story of today's political economy of global capitalism, development, and the war on terror as disparate actors intersect in Arabia

Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World

Arguably the most fascinating and least understood country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fantastic. A country long regarded by classical geographers as a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded sacred incense groves, while medieval Arab visitors told tales of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Our current ideas of this country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula have been hijacked by images of the terrorist strongholds, drone attacks, and diplomatic tensions. But, as Mackintosh-Smith reminds us in this newly updated book, there is another Arabia. Yemen may be a part of Arabia, but it is like no place on earth.

Yemen: The Unknown Arabia

"The Graves of Tarim "narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, this book brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire. 

Ho interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, he demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature. His supple conceptual framework and innovative use of documentary and field evidence are elegantly combined to present a vision of this vital world region beyond the histories of trade and European empire.

The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean

A Tribal Order describes the politico-legal system of Jabal Razih, a remote massif in northern Yemen inhabited by farmers and traders. Contrary to the popular image of Middle Eastern tribes as warlike, lawless, and invariably opposed to states, the tribes of Razih have stable structures of governance and elaborate laws and procedures for maintaining order and resolving conflicts with a minimum of physical violence. Razihi leaders also historically cooperated with states, provided the latter respected their customs, ideals, and interests. Weir considers this system in the context of the rugged environment and productive agricultural economy of Razih, and of centuries of continuous rule by Zaydi Muslim regimes and (latterly) the republican governments of Yemen. The book is based on Weir’s extended anthropological fieldwork on Jabal Razih, and on her detailed study of hundreds of handwritten contracts and treaties among and between the tribes and rulers of Razih. These documents provide a fascinating insight into tribal politics and law, as well as state-tribe relations, from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century. A Tribal Order is also enriched by case histories that vividly illuminate tribal practices. Overall, this unusually wide-ranging work provides an accessible account of a remarkable Arabian society through time.

A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen

"Tribes and Politics in Yemen" tells the story of the Houthi conflict in Sa'dah Province, Yemen, as seen through the eyes of the local tribes. In the West the Houthi conflict, which erupted in 2004, is often defined through the lenses of either the Iranian-Saudi proxy war or the Sunni Shia divide. Yet, as experienced by locals, the Houthi conflict is much more deeply rooted in the recent history of Sa'dah Province. Its origins must be sought in the political, economic, social and sectarian transformations since the 1960s civil war and their repercussions on the local society, which is dominated by tribal norms. From the civil war to the Houthi conflict these transformations involve the same individuals, families and groups, and are driven by the same struggles over resources, prerogatives, and power. 

This book is based on years of anthropological fieldwork expertise both on the ground and through digital anthropological approaches. It offers a detailed account of the local complexities of the Houthi conflict and its historical background and underscores the absolute imperative of understanding the highly local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in Yemen.

Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict

Yemen: Travels In Dictionary Land

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation

An NYRB Classics Original 
"Arabia Felix" is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously astray. On a winter morning in 1761 six men leave Copenhagen by sea--a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their manservant--an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the first Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first organized foray into a corner of the world unknown to Europeans, an enterprise that had the support of the Danish Crown and was keenly followed throughout Europe. The expedition made its way to Turkey and Egypt, by which time its members were already actively seeking to undercut and even kill one another, before disappearing into the harsh desert that was their destination. Nearly seven years later a single survivor returned to Denmark to find himself a forgotten man and all the specimens that had been sent back ruined by neglect. 
 Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, "Arabia Felix" is both a comedy of intellectual rivalry and very bad manners and an utterly absorbing tale of high adventure."

Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767

Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and al-Qaeda are fighting a clandestine war of drones and suicide bombers in an unforgiving corner of Arabia. "The Last Refuge" charts the rise, fall, and resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen over the last thirty years, detailing how a group that the United States once defeated has now become one of the world's most dangerous threats. An expert on Yemen who has spent years on the ground there, Gregory D. Johnsen uses al-Qaeda's Arabic battle notes to reconstruct their world as they take aim at the United States and its allies. Johnsen brings readers inside al-Qaeda's training camps and safe houses as the terrorists plot poison attacks and debate how to bring down an airliner on Christmas Day. "The Last Refuge" is an eye-opening look at the successes and failures of fighting a new type of war in one of the most turbulent countries in the world.

The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia

Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. "Islands of Heritage" shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state.

Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution. "Islands of Heritage" shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.

Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen

"Beyond the Arab Cold War" brings the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68, to the forefront of modern Middle East History. During the 1960s, in the wake of a coup against Imam Muhammad al-Badr and the formation of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict. Believing al-Badr to be dead, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and most countries recognized the YAR. But when al-Badr unexpectedly turned up alive, Saudi Arabia and Britain offered support to the deposed Imam, drawing Yemen into an internationally-sponsored civil war. Throughout six years of major conflict, Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war. 

Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egyptian counterinsurgency, and one of the first largescale uses of poison gas since WWI. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Britain, Canada, Israel, the UN, the US, and the USSR joined Egypt and Saudi Arabia in assuming varying roles in fighting, mediating, and supplying the belligerent forces. Despite Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Nasser's Arab Nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces. 

This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history, overseeing the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East that continue to lie at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.

Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962 - 68

Like other Arab revolutions in 2011, it is said that Yemen's rebellion was modeled on street protests in Tunis and Cairo. As this erudite new study explains, however, what happened in Yemen is far from being a mere echo of events elsewhere. In fact, the popular uprisings which came as a surprise in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya and Syria, were already well underway in Yemen. As early as 2007, this country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula was embroiled in sit-ins, demonstrations, and open rebellion against the government. The author ably demonstrates how Yemen's political upheaval is rooted in divisions and conflicts of the past, especially the country's troubled national unification in 1990. Based on years of in-depth field research, this book unravels the complexities of the Yemeni state and its domestic politics with a particular focus on the post-1990 years. The central thesis is that Yemen continues to suffer from regional fragmentation which has endured for centuries. En route the book discusses the rise of President Salih, his tribal and family connections, Yemen's civil war in 1994, the war's consequences later in the decade, the spread of radical movements after the US military response to 9/11, and finally developments leading to the historic events of 2011. Politics in this strategically important country is crucial for many reasons, not least on account of its links to al-Qaeda terrorism. The United States and western allies have good reason to regard Yemen as a security risk. This book sets a new standard for scholarship on Yemeni politics, and it is essential reading for anyone interested in the modern Middle East, the 2011 Arab revolts, and 21st century Islamic politics.

Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union

South Yemen has come to be seen as a potential Al-Qaeda stronghold and at the heart of a separatist movement threatening to rip apart southern Arabia. How has this country of forbidding mountains and arid deserts gone from British colony to communist state and then to "terrorist base" in just half a century? In "Yemen Divided", author and Middle East expert Noel Brehony tells for the first time the comprehensive history of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). He explains the power politics that came to form a communist republic a few hundred miles from the holiest site in Islam, and the process and conflicts that led to Yemeni unification in 1990. The impact of the PDRY is still felt today as Saudi and government armed forces engage with Houthis in the North and unrest continues to simmer across the South. "Yemen Divided" is an important book for anyone wanting to understand why Yemen, sensitive neighbor of Saudi Arabia and strategically vital to Middle East security, has veered towards massive instability.

Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia

The government of Yemen, unified since 1990, remains largely incapable of controlling violence or providing goods and services to its population, but the regime continues to endure despite its fragility and peripheral location in the global political and economic order. Revealing what holds Yemen together in such tenuous circumstances, "Peripheral Visions" shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions. 
 
Lisa Wedeen, who spent a year and a half in Yemen observing and interviewing its residents, argues that national solidarity in such weak states tends to arise not from attachments to institutions but through both extraordinary events and the ordinary activities of everyday life. Yemenis, for example, regularly gather to chew qat, a leafy drug similar to caffeine, as they engage in wide-ranging and sometimes influential public discussions of even the most divisive political and social issues. These lively debates exemplify Wedeen’s contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry’s shared points of reference. Ultimately, her skillful evocations of such practices shift attention away from a narrow focus on government institutions and electoral competition and toward the substantive experience of participatory politics.

Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen

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.

Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism

Winner of the Acad�mie Fran�aise's Prix Eug�ne Colas

Contemporary Yemen has an image problem. It has long fascinated travelers and artists, and to many embodies both Arab and Muslim authenticity; it stands at important geostrategic and commercial crossroads. Yet, strangely, global perceptions of Yemen are of an entity that is somehow both marginal and passive, yet also dangerous and problematic.

The Saudi offensive launched in 2015 has made Yemen a victim of regional power struggles, while the global 'war on terror' has labelled it a threat to international security. This perception has had disastrous effects without generating real interest in the country or its people. On the contrary, Yemen's complex political dynamics have been largely ignored by international observers--resulting in problematic, if not counterproductive, international policies.

Yemen and the World offers a corrective to these misconceptions and omissions, putting aside the nature of the world's interest in Yemen to focus on Yemen's role on the global stage. Laurent Bonnefoy uses six areas of modern international exchange--globalization, diplomacy, trade, migration, culture and militant Islamism--to restore Yemen to its place at the heart of contemporary affairs. To understand Yemen, he argues, is to understand the Middle East as a whole.


Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity

"Nasser's Gamble" draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as my Vietnam. Jesse Ferris argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967.


 Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi-Egyptian struggle over Yemen, Ferris demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the Arab Cold War set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam.


 Bold and provocative, "Nasser's Gamble" brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.

-- "Choice"

Nasser's Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power

Over the years, the government of Yemen has conducted military operations north of the capital against groups of its citizens known as 'Huthis'. This volume examines the conflict in all its sociocultural, political, and military aspects. It provides a history of the Huthi movement and its origins in the Zaydi branch of Islam.

Regime and Periphery in Northern Yemen: The Huthi Phenomenon

Sheila Carapico's book on civic participation in modern Yemen makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of political culture in Arabia. The author traces the complexities of Yemen's history over the past fifty years, considering its response to the colonial encounter and to years of civil unrest. Challenging the stereotypical view of conservative Arab Muslim society, she demonstrates how the country is actively seeking to develop the political, economic and social structures of the modern democratic state. This is an important book that promises to become the definitive statement on twentieth-century Yemen.

Civil Society in Yemen

Examining political and socioeconomic change in the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), this book, first published in 1987, focuses primarily on the quarter century following the overthrow of the imamate in 1962. The problems and politics of the period s republican leaders and their regimes are analysed against the backdrop of Yemen s traditional Islamic theocracy, the Zaydi imamate, which ruled for over a millennium. A country very similar to Afghanistan in its mountainous terrain, tribal social organization, and traditional Islamic culture, the YAR was almost completely isolated and insulated from the modern world and modern politics until the ousting of the imamate. This book explores in detail the processes of change, the political leaders involved, and the impact of domestic and external forces. Dr Burrowes draws on his extensive conversations with YAR leaders to provide a unique view of a country trying to cope with change and modernization."

Yemen

Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State

Helen Lackner

Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia

Ginny Hill

Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes

Victoria Clark

A History of Modern Yemen

Paul Dresch

Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World

Isa Blumi

Yemen: The Unknown Arabia

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean

Engseng Ho

A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen

Shelagh Weir

Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict

Marieke Brandt

Yemen: Travels In Dictionary Land

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation

Steven C. Caton

Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767

Thorkild Hansen

The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia

Gregory D. Johnsen

Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen

Nathalie Peutz

Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962 - 68

Asher Orkaby

Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union

Stephen W. Day

Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia

Noel Brehony

Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen

Lisa Wedeen

Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism

Isa Blumi

Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity

Laurent Bonnefoy

Nasser's Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power

Jesse Ferris

Regime and Periphery in Northern Yemen: The Huthi Phenomenon

Barak A. Salmoni

Civil Society in Yemen

Sheila Carapico

The Yemen Arab Republic: The Politics Of Development, 1962-1986

Robert D. Burrowes