1. Introduction
Partial or total collapses in state authority, once rare, are no longer outliers in an otherwise stable international state system.1 A growing number of formally defined ‘states’ – that is, places with official borders and internationally recognized governments – now exist in reality only as lines on maps and concepts in policy papers and newspaper reports. The governments in these places lack the ability to perform the most basic of state functions, or are able to do so only in enclaves of state control. For the most part, governance vacuums on the ground are filled by unofficial groups that perform state-like functions.
In such places, basic functions and services – the supply of electricity and water, security, justice – are provided by political opposition networks, local communities and identity groups including extremist organizations like Al-Qaeda, often using revenues raised from taxing local trade. The lines between formal, informal and illicit economies are so blurred as to be almost entirely erased. Thus, in some cases the same networks that sustain gun-runners and people smugglers also ensure the flow of basic goods and even services to the poor.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has proven particularly susceptible to this kind of disorder. The region had a reputation for instability even before the Arab Spring uprisings that began in Tunisia in 2010, the reverberations of which continue to be felt from the coasts of the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean. Today, the MENA region confronts what the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (UNESCWA) describes as ‘a bewildering array of intense, complex, and interlocked armed conflicts’.2 Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen face varying degrees of internal turmoil, deepened by the proliferation of armed groups with wildly different agendas and by the internationalization of the countries’ conflicts.
State collapse and civil war in the MENA region have precipitated some of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, displaced millions, destabilized and strained neighbouring economies, and given extremist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) room to grow and plan attacks on foreign soil. Unsurprisingly, this has made the region a top priority for international policymakers.
Conventional diplomatic, peacebuilding and state-building tools, often developed around binary models better suited to interstate conflict, have proven inadequate in the face of complex, interconnected challenges.
Conventional diplomatic, peacebuilding and state-building tools, often developed around binary models better suited to interstate conflict, have proven inadequate in the face of these complex, interconnected challenges. Many analysts have come to believe that a new approach is needed if stability is to be brought to the lives of the tens of millions of people caught in or affected by conflict and state collapse.
This paper argues that policymakers and politicians need to fundamentally change the way they think about so-called ‘failed’ and ‘failing’ states. Rather than viewing them as ungoverned spaces entirely without order in which centralized government needs to be restored to create structure, policymakers and politicians must acknowledge that these ‘chaos states’ in fact have their own internal logic, with legitimacy earned at the local level rather than being imposed from the top down. In each case, the diverse groups within a given state will have very different incentives for cooperation in any peace deal – incentives often divorced from any proposed solution to the ‘master cleavage’3 that initiated conflict.
Yemen is in just such a position. The country is in the midst of profound and lasting change, having experienced shifts in power and territorial control that are unlikely to be reversed by any political peace accord. Civil wars such as Yemen’s do not just destroy local infrastructure, state institutions or political orders, they also:
… contribute to shaping and producing them. Civil wars, in other words, are part and parcel of state formation… if we are to understand how stable political institutions can be built in the aftermath of civil war, it is essential to study the institutions that regulate political life during conflict.4
To understand what the Yemen of tomorrow might look like, we must therefore try to understand how it is being changed by the civil war of today.
In common with most internal conflicts, the war in Yemen is not a binary contest for power, but a complicated and overlapping series of rivalries and armed struggles. Yemen has been divided into areas of territorial and political control, with meaningful front-line fighting limited to several largely static battlefields beyond which Yemenis attempt to continue their day-to-day existences and to insulate themselves against future political cleavages.
Each territory has its own leadership structure, internal politics and external backers, to the extent that Yemen resembles less a divided country than a collection of mini-states engaged in a complex intraregional conflict. The role of third parties – in particular Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, the UK and the US – with different and often divergent agendas deepens the complexity of the conflict, and is likely to prolong it. The presence of Salafist fighters, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the local branch of ISIS – and the apparent separation of UAE- and US-led counterterrorism initiatives from broader policy frameworks – adds yet another layer of complexity to any attempt to resolve the conflict(s). Since mid-2017, meanwhile, internal power struggles between ostensible allies have taken priority over the national-level conflict.
Dozens of interviews and meetings conducted during the research for this paper indicate that policymakers and diplomats are largely in agreement with the analysis above. Yet the current UN-led mediation process is still focused on engaging with the two ‘sides’ named in a 2015 UN Security Council resolution. These nominal principal actors are, respectively, the government of exiled President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and the now-collapsed alliance between the Houthis and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The binary UN approach is increasingly divorced from the reality of Yemen’s political geography, particularly since the Houthi–Saleh split of early December 2017, which resulted in the death of Saleh and sharply changed the balance of power in the north and west of Yemen. So-called ‘track two’ initiatives, which could widen the scope of mediation, are not at a sufficiently advanced stage to make their integration into a broader peace process feasible in the near future. Many international policymakers also mistakenly assume, and hope, that a single political system with a single leader will emerge from the conflict, on the grounds that this would make interaction with a post-war Yemen easier.
Policymakers often develop a nuanced understanding of contexts such as Yemen’s over time, but all too often they struggle to build policies that reflect this subtlety. Ultimately, in Yemen and elsewhere, policies need to be built around reality as it is, rather than as policymakers and other stakeholders would like it to be.
As such, Yemen’s recent history contains a cautionary tale. It is widely accepted that diplomats and other foreign officials devoted most of their resources during the transitional period of 2012–14 to just three tasks: addressing the political wrangling among the country’s previous elite; maintaining President Hadi’s position; and conducting counterterrorism initiatives. These efforts were prioritized to the virtual exclusion of many other issues that were far more important to local populations.5 This narrow focus – a product of regional and capital-level priorities – left many Yemenis feeling excluded from the ‘real’ political process. In addition, it resulted in an institutional ‘blind spot’ among foreign officials vis-à-vis the agenda and intentions of the Houthis, a historically marginalized Zaydi Shia movement from the northern province of Sa’dah who were not seen as being important players in national-level politics. Consequently, in September 2014 the Houthis were able to seize Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, with relatively little resistance.
Since the war began, in late 2014/early 2015, the structure of power in Yemen has been fundamentally altered. Failure to recognize this, to anticipate the growing strength of key groups, or to translate a new understanding into policy could lead to the mistakes of the past being repeated, with realization dawning too late and policy built around static, out-of-date models.
The cost of taking a business-as-usual approach to Yemen is clear. Most peace deals collapse within five years.6 They are more likely to do so in contexts involving several factions on the ground, a wide variety of third-party state interests, and a peace process or deal that excludes key groups. All of these factors are present – or, on the basis of current policy frameworks, will be present – in Yemen.
About this paper
This paper provides a systemic analysis of Yemen’s ‘chaos state’, accompanied by an interactive digital map hosted on the Chatham House website (https://yemen-map.chathamhouse.org), aimed at giving policymakers and political leaders the context and tools required to rethink their approach to Yemen. It also provides a table of incentives for key players in the conflict to cooperate in a peace process (see Table 2, pages 48–49). The paper also offers recommendations for developing a joined-up policy to end the conflict, and for developing a durable post-war political and economic settlement.
1 When, in 1994, the CIA’s Political Instability Task Force began to study the issue of state failure, it found too few incidences of the phenomenon on record to be able to build quantitative models. A quarter of a century later, it has no such problem.
2 Wilcoxon, G. (2017), Political Transformation and Conflict: Post-War Risks in the Arab Region, UNESCWA.
3 Kalyvas, S. (2003), ‘The Ontology of ‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3.
4 Péclard, D. and Mechoulan, D. (2015), Rebel Governance and the Politics of Civil War, working paper, Swisspeace, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/191183/WP_1_2015.pdf.
5 See, for example, Yemen Polling Center (2012), Yemeni citizens’ main concerns, perception of human rights and CSOs, http://yemenpolling.org/Projects-en/Yemeni_Citizens_Concerns_Perception_of_Human_Rights_and_CSOs_(_English_Version)_v3.pdf.
6 Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute Oslo, ‘Armed Conflict Dataset’, http://ucdp.uu.se.