The partitions of Yemen

This is a work that is three times singular that Laurent Bonnefoy delivers with Yemen: From Happy Arabia to War. It reports on a decidedly personal experience of the country with a constrained distance erected as a method. The increasing impermeability of Yemen to researchers since the 2000s and even more so after the 2011 revolution is fully integrated into the proposed analysis. Although it does not always facilitate understanding, this methodological honesty is the second singularity of the book. Finally, the simple and illustrated parts are in some places interrupted by more complex, sometimes polemical methodological developments. These developments go beyond the sole case of Yemen and allow us to see in this country a “laboratory” (p. 327) where the challenges of a poor country in the face of globalization are observed. All this makes this work a read that will stimulate the curious as much as the specialist.

Even in the internal structure of its chapters, the book is marked by a conflict whose complexity L. Bonnefoy does not seek to reduce and which he does not limit to the war born from the distortion of the 2011 revolution and the Saudi intervention against the Houthi movement. The bias of explaining this conflict by relying on the political and cultural history of the country distinguishes this text from the other rare works in European language on contemporary Yemen. It is Yemen’s relationship to the world, and not the other way around, that forms the subject of the Yemen: From Happy Arabia to War. To the observation of a marginalization suffered and sometimes claimed in international relations or a reduction of Yemen to a rich, but also misleading, imaginary, the work associates another, declined in its historical (chapter 1), migratory (chapter 4) and cultural (chapter 6) aspects: that of an early and continuous integration of Yemenis and Yemen – including during the war – into globalization. If it forced the author to some repetitions, the thematic plan of the book allows to enter into the explanation of this paradox.

A report to the world

The first half of the book is devoted to the main “issues” that guide Yemen’s relations with the rest of the world. It briefly recalls the way in which this split territory was built and then officially unified in 1990, not without provoking a war in 1994 that pitted the southern supporters of a return to the pre-1990 separation against the troops of North Yemen, allied (already) with Islamist militias. L. Bonnefoy describes the construction of the State, its fragmentation into power networks and sometimes competing territories, its particular relations with Saudi Arabia and the United States, while recalling that the early globalization of Yemen was as much and perhaps more oriented towards Asia than the West. Seeking to understand why Yemen has been one of the main global nodes of transnational Islamism since the late 1970s, the author notes how the security prism that dictates the relations of the Yemeni state with its partners has blurred the understanding of the country’s transformations and led international policies to dead ends. But he also emphasizes the contestation, on the ground, of jihadist activism by other Salafist and Sufi movements, and clearly distinguishes the solid roots of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQPA) of the establishment of the Islamic State.

This analysis provides the author with the opportunity to emphasize the “context” of the commitments to armed violence and to defend an analysis of Islamist protest close to that of François Burgat. He thus calls into question the assimilation of all movements opposed to the State before the emergence of the Islamic State (EI) in Yemen to “jihadist” movements by the authorities in Sanaa, the United States and their allies. He emphasizes the local motivations for violence, in particular opposition to the central state, whether it comes from the politicization of the Zaydi movement during the 1980s-1990s until the war with the state in 2004, from tribes or from marginalized regions after unification under the regime of ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Saleh, president of North Yemen from 1978 to 1990, then of reunified Yemen from 1990 to 2011.

Yemeni flows

The second half of the book is dedicated to the participation of Yemen and Yemenis in the human, material and intellectual circulations of the world. By reviewing the waves of emigration that the country has experienced since the Muslim expansion of VII^e century until 1990, the author recalls that they are linked to crises whose environmental and military dimensions recall the current crisis. The Hadrami emigration around the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and that of Yemenite Jews to Israel are the best-known examples until the mass expulsions from the Gulf countries during the war of 1990-1991. By mobilizing concrete examples and varied scientific references, the author devotes striking pages to these Yemeni “migrants, traders and refugees”. They conclude with the dual observation of a much more constrained and limited emigration since the 1990s, oriented towards Asia (China, India, Indonesia) more than Europe, the United States and – until 2015 at least – Africa.

This synthesis of Yemeni emigration is completed by a chapter in which L. Bonnefoy synthesizes a series of recent research works and takes up conclusions from his own work on the Yemeni Salafist movements. He reviews the different economic, religious and tourist immigrations that make Yemen a land of welcome, training and varied businesses for Africans and Asians as much as for Europeans and Americans until the 2000s. The end of the immigration cycle is signaled by the reversal of migratory flows between the Horn of Africa and Yemen from 2015, with Yemenis taking to the sea again to flee their country.

The analysis of “Yemeni flows” is concluded by an original chapter on artistic circulations in which Yemenis more or less connected to their country are the actors. L. Bonnefoy underlines not only the ancient transnational character of Yemeni cultural production, permitted by Yemeni emigration and the foreign presence in Yemen, but also the country’s capacity to adapt global productions to the local context and to maintain these circulations. As in the Syrian case recently studied by Wissam al-Nasser, the 2011 revolution encouraged the use of online media and social networks by artists. Since the beginning of the war launched in 2015, the Internet has served as a relay for creators and institutions redeployed abroad, and as a last window for those who, like the visual artist Murad Subay’, have remained in Yemen. The dynamism and constant modernization of Yemeni artistic production, as well as its growing independence from institutions since reunification (1990), are one of the elements that justify the resolutely optimistic, yet lucid and critical, conclusion of the work.

Spaces of a crisis

Yemen’s “thwarted relationship” (p. 322) with the world is described and explained by the marginalization of the country and by the relationship of domination to which it is subjected by the great powers and its Saudi neighbor. These two fundamental traits do not, by themselves, characterize Yemen’s place in the world. L. Bonnefoy gives equal importance to the endogenous factors of the relationship of interdependence between the country, its neighbors and the great powers that intervene there. The economic and political decline of the city of Aden after the 1994 war, caused by the first challenge to unification, is a significant event in the evolution of this relationship with the world, which deteriorated from 1990 onwards, in a city that has long been a global and cosmopolitan crossroads (p. 67-70). The logic of anti-terrorism that has been imposed since the 2000s in international relations has encouraged rather than limited the growing insecurity in the country by installing a climate of blind and permanent war, and by facilitating the assimilation of any contestation of the central State to a terrorist movement. It has progressively distorted the reading of events by researchers and diplomats by imposing security prisms and limiting contacts with the society and groups in question.

Because such readings stem from a partial perception of the Yemeni State, L. Bonnefoy devotes several pages to the crystallization of a dual State until the reunification that occurred in the middle of the Gulf War and whose achievements (political modernization) and failures (the domination of the North, the maintenance of a dual diplomacy) he describes. One might have wished that a few additional lines were devoted to the Ottoman period (the author himself recognizes that this takeover was not only “formal”, p. 44), or to the evolution of the Zaydi Imamate since the works of B. Haykel are known to him. The bottom line is that the “fragmentation” of the Yemeni state, its division into competing networks, its contestation by rebel governments (the South in 1994, the Houthis in 2016) and then its collapse during the war are precisely described and make the formal state a sometimes misleading prism for understanding the history of the country and its relations with the world (p. 126), as is the case for Saudi foreign policy towards Yemen (p. 116).

The geopolitics to which the book conforms gives full space to Yemenis and, remarkably, is based on the work of many Yemeni researchers and authors. It thus corrects the reading grids that tend to “dematerialize” the country (p. 87), by introducing phenomena and paths described in their context and complexity. The only thing missing from this reading of the realities of contemporary Yemen is an analysis of its demography, marked by the persistence of a very high fertility rate (nearly 6 children per woman). Briefly mentioned, it undoubtedly constitutes one of the distinctive features of the country, which Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd described, before the 2011 revolution, as a “demographic diplodocus”.