5. Yemen as a Chaos State
‘New wars’ and diplomacy
Many conflicts today bear the hallmarks of what the academic Mary Kaldor describes as ‘new wars’,85 of the kind that broke out across the globe following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. These conflicts are fought by ‘varying combinations of networks of state and non-state actors’, and are fuelled by identity politics rather than geopolitical interests or formal political ideology.
Rather than taking place on conventional battlefields, ‘new wars’ are fought using unconventional and asymmetrical methods, and are funded not just by governments or external powers, but also by transnational movements such as Al-Qaeda. Such conflicts are also funded by illicit trade, enabled by the permissiveness of a lightly scrutinized international financial system that allows elites to loot resources and funds before and during wars, stow them away in foreign banks, and use them to buy influence and sustain conflict. New wars are messier, more complex and harder to resolve than the inter- and intrastate conflicts of the past.
One problem with resolving the new wars, another academic, David Keen, has argued, is that their protagonists are not so preoccupied with ‘winning’ outright victories. Rather, historically marginalized groups see relatively modest territorial, political and economic gains as successes in and of themselves, even in the context of an ongoing conflict.86 This is arguably the case in Yemen.
All this makes understanding the mindsets of the groups involved in conflict crucial to negotiating political settlements and assessing incentives for cooperation in peace agreements. In a given conflict, many groups may stand to lose from a peace deal even if the wider population gains. If one group achieves greater political power, this is likely to come at the expense of another rival group, creating a fresh cycle of grievance and violence. Often, the emergence of a broad status quo in which conflict continues but the interests of key groups are served – and in which ostensibly warring parties cooperate – is preferable to a peace deal, Keen argues.87
‘The conventional model of a peace process is drawn from international negotiations in which there are two sides with equal legal standing and roughly commensurate capabilities,’ argues Alex de Waal, providing the image of a ‘square table, with the parties facing one another, and the mediator at the head of the table’.88 In reality, he writes, most conflicts do not fit this model. Yet many peace processes, like Yemen’s, are designed for clearly defined, two-sided conflicts. They promote power sharing and constitutional reform, some form of wealth sharing – including promises of money from abroad – and ‘security arrangements, beginning with a ceasefire and concluding with disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration, and security sector reform’. If the resulting deals are to work, they require strong institutions, which are rarely in place; most countries beset by civil conflict tend to have particularly weak institutions. As a result, most such deals collapse when the political calculus that underpinned them changes. On average, violent conflict returns to around half of all countries where formal peace deals have been negotiated within five years of such deals being signed.89
The problem with many peace deals is that they rarely address the underlying causes of the conflict. As such, they are little more than ‘glorified ceasefires’ (as some officials have described the framework for Yemen’s peace process). Phil Vernon, for example, writes:
After a lid has been put on the fighting, peace needs to be carefully nurtured and encouraged to evolve in subsequent years to deal with the issues that caused the conflict in the first place—such as inequality, poverty and historical grievances—and slowly building trust between the different sides. But the mechanisms and support required to do this are often lacking, especially on the most sensitive and hardest issues—the ‘higher hanging fruit’.90
Peace deals also often largely reflect external pressures and agendas, and are driven by calculated decisions by belligerents that the time is right to sue for peace. Agreements are also susceptible to being undermined by ‘leaders and factions who view a particular peace as opposed to their interests and who are willing to use violence to undermine it’.91 When such actors are excluded from the negotiation of a peace deal and from its attendant benefits, they become ‘outside spoilers’.
Policymaking constraints
Yemen’s war is not a unique case, either in its complexity or the nature of the international response. In February 2017, Chatham House convened a roundtable in London, bringing together experts on Yemen and other conflicts – including those in Syria, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – in order to provide a broader picture of some of the challenges and limitations policymakers face.92 Similar questions were posed at a policymakers’ retreat in Oxfordshire in May 2017.93
Policymakers working on the Yemen crisis and other regional issues face constraints ranging from the human and other resources at their disposal to the priorities of their respective governments. Consequently, their work is often based on calculations of what would constitute the most effective approach bearing in mind these priorities and constraints.
The priorities in this region for Western countries are often their domestic security (in relation to the threats from Al-Qaeda and ISIS), protecting international trade (through the Red Sea and around the Horn of Africa), and addressing threats to their allies (Saudi Arabia in particular). Western policymakers also point to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen as an important consideration, because of the moral imperative to prevent human suffering and because of the reputational risks that would result from inaction, particularly for countries with deep ties with Saudi Arabia. ‘Yemen has to keep passing the Daily Mail test,’ said one British policymaker, citing the influence of the major right-wing newspaper on UK policy.
Wider geopolitical considerations also factor into the foreign policies of Western states towards Yemen. Many officials are privately, and at times publicly, of the view that the Houthis are not in fact an Iranian proxy in the mould of Hezbollah, for example. But the broader concerns of Saudi Arabia and the UAE over Iranian expansionism across the Middle East are seen as entirely valid. The two Gulf states are also seen as important partners in the battle against Al-Qaeda and ISIS, for maintaining regional stability, and for trade and investment (a particular priority of the UK and US governments).
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are seen by Western states as important partners in the battle against Al-Qaeda and ISIS, for maintaining regional stability, and for trade and investment
Another constraint on policymakers is their limited knowledge of local dynamics or how to implement local programming. As one Western official noted at Chatham House’s May policy retreat, ‘We all understand that we need to do more at the local level, but there is a gap between that and knowing how to do the ground-up, grassroots stuff.’ In line with subsequent interviews, participants at the May workshop agreed that even well-informed foreign officials tend to see conflicts through the prism of national- or capital-level dynamics and rivalries – issues with which they tend to be more familiar – and miss local, regional and even key international dimensions. Yet excluding these issues from analysis makes it harder to understand the incentives for key groups to sustain or resolve conflicts, and this only deepens the pre-existing gaps in analysis.
International policymakers also, at times, see some actors as either unacceptable or too marginal to be involved in mediation. Yet as a leading expert on the drivers of conflict in civil wars has argued, building peace around what the international community considers to be the ‘right’ actors rarely works. The grievances of those who have been excluded from an accord will only deepen in a context in which it has been demonstrated that the best way to earn resources and power is to take up arms. ‘You can’t just leave out the people you don’t want or like,’ said a participant in the February 2017 Chatham House workshop.94
More broadly, solutions to persistent, complex conflicts such as Yemen’s take time, often years, to emerge. The prerequisite for ending conflicts is either genuine willingness among the warring parties to do so; or the willingness of external powers to expend sufficient resources and political capital to bring hostilities to a halt. In best-case scenarios, both ambitions are present.
The roots of many modern conflicts lie in local grievances, regional divisions and regime-led policies of marginalization. If such grievances are not addressed, new forms of marginalization and exclusion replace older ones, and conflict will almost invariably re-emerge. Local issues, meanwhile, can and should be addressed during a conflict, not just once it ends.
Unfortunately, the international community all too often works in silos and with short time frames, lacks a clear set of priorities and is too risk-averse, participants in the February Chatham House meeting agreed. Senior policymakers with wide-ranging briefs also struggle to understand the complex dynamics that underpin conflicts, relying on thin readings of elite rivalries (many senior decision-makers draw on ‘five bullet points and two sides of A4’ for context on many conflicts, said a veteran researcher). Shifts in policy, in turn, can only come from a shift among senior decision-makers towards embracing complexity.
A new model
As with Syria, Libya and many other countries in the midst of debilitating civil conflicts, there is a strong argument for a peace and political process in Yemen that is expanded to include a wider range of groups and individuals than has been attempted to date, so that it better resembles the current map of the political economy of the war. (Efforts to develop more inclusive processes have been made in Libya and Syria, albeit with limited success.) Yet diplomats and other officials interviewed for this paper uniformly argue that bringing more parties into the Yemen mediation process at this stage would add unnecessary complexity to proceedings and slow talks down.
This flies in the face of most evidence on the short-term and long-term inclusion of numerous parties in peace deals and peace processes. Leading scholars of peace processes argue that an exclusive peace process ‘increases the likelihood of creating spoilers who have the potential to disrupt the peace’.95
More importantly, including more parties in the existing peace process – even as part of a subsidiary mechanism – would not make the situation in Yemen inherently more complicated. Indeed, it would only reflect existing complexity. Policy should mould itself to fit Yemen, rather than Yemen moulding itself to fit policymakers’ preferred frameworks or preconceptions.
Resistance to models that emphasize complexity, inclusivity and localism is not uncommon. Anecdotally, at Chatham House meetings on Yemen in The Hague, London and Oxfordshire in 2016 and 2017 – and at many similar workshops – a pattern emerged. Policymakers and experts would agree that equal weight should be given to bottom-up policies that help create social cohesion, support local economic growth, and create feedback loops between ordinary citizens and political leaders. They would also agree that the war in Yemen is likely to last for some time, and that policies should work on the assumption that the status quo will continue. When it came to developing policy recommendations, however, the conversation repeatedly returned to top-down models based on the assumed presence of a strong central government and the expectation that policies would be implemented in a post-conflict setting.
Including more parties in the existing peace process would not make the situation in Yemen inherently more complicated
‘Perhaps there is a psychological bias across the diplomatic community for matching like with like,’ said a former Western official who has worked on conflict zones (including Yemen) over several decades, when asked about this phenomenon:
Diplomats and politicians tend to be more comfortable dealing with people like themselves, who understand and apply the same behavioural norms […] There’s the prevailing view that the inclusion of more participants will inevitably mean the addition of more potential spoilers. Herding cats requires patience, stamina and a thorough understanding of the issues. There is the pre-eminence of the Westphalian principle which dominates the UN’s approach to peace negotiations. Each nation state has sovereignty over its own territory and internal affairs, with the acceptance of the non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs. Therefore, there is the natural inclination to focus on state institutions and representatives. Including issues which dominate the grassroots may be construed as interference in the internal affairs of another state and therefore an illegitimate interest.96
Yet it is increasingly clear that new frameworks are needed for conflict mediation and peacebuilding in the MENA region and beyond. These are unlikely to emerge unless policymakers fundamentally change how they think about the nature and structure of conflict, and about realistic goals and policy responses. There is a need for policy based on reality as it is, rather than as foreign functionaries would like it to be.
In the case of Yemen, the state has not disappeared, yet nor was it ever entirely present in a form that corresponds to a Westernized, Westphalian model. Today, many state-like functions in Yemen are fulfilled, to a greater or lesser extent, by a diverse collection of non-state actors and competing ‘state’ actors, including armed groups, tribes, groups of militants such as AQAP, and so on – each with varying degrees and different kinds of legitimacy, and with no central body to regulate and coordinate them.
This is what can be termed a ‘chaos state’: a place in which the central state has either collapsed or lost control of large segments of the territory over which it is nominally sovereign, and in which a political economy has emerged in which groups of varying degrees of legitimacy cooperate and compete with one another. From the outside, such places appear to be chaotic – there is ‘general disorder’ – but they contain their own internal logic, economies and political ecosystems.
The term ‘chaos state’ draws its inspiration from the mathematical discipline of chaos theory.97 Known for its association with the term ‘butterfly effect’, chaos theory has roots in the work of the mathematician and weather forecaster Edward Lorenz. His key insight was that even tiny, apparently irrelevant changes in inputs can lead to huge effects, caused by complex systems rather than random error. Modern practitioners of chaos theory hope to move beyond sanitized models excised of error towards an understanding of how complex systems function.
This debate in mathematics over chaos theory – which has gained growing currency in the business and domestic policymaking worlds – mirrors, to an extent, some of the debate around ‘fragile’ or conflict-affected countries.
Even in the midst of the messiest conflict, places such as Yemen contain improvised or partially informal systems of government, trade and politics. Multilayered networks of armed groups and local governance replace the state, where it existed at all, while key formal institutions are eroded beyond a few core functions. These institutions may often include an increasingly ill-disciplined military, key financial bodies such as a central bank and finance ministry, and a foreign ministry, the latter required to present the semblance of the ‘state’ to the outside world.
The essential point is thus that chaos states are not vacuums of structure waiting for the right leader to restore order, or for the international community to work out the right system of government. They are places where people have done their best to find ways of living, often under the most horrific of circumstances, and they must be understood before misguided and ill-informed attempts to ‘fix’ them are undertaken. All too often, peace deals focus on ending the ‘big war’ between national-level players but ignore the political and economic ecology of the chaos state. On-the-ground rivalries and grievances thus remain unaddressed, and ‘unity’ governments are set up in direct opposition to local actors. As a result, ‘small wars’ persist and all too often national-level ceasefires collapse.
The current international approach sometimes seems to suggest that with the application of the correct ‘algorithm’, so to speak, Yemen and places like it can somehow be tilted from chaos into orderly ‘stateness’ of a kind that is comfortingly familiar to policymakers: one with a central government and institutions such as a foreign ministry, ministry of defence and central bank managed by qualified individuals, with a single leader at the top of the pyramid, and the country neatly managed by these people. In theory, the main driver of this new order should be the ‘enlightened self-interest’ of the groups, individuals and third-party states involved in conflict.
Yet in practice, the incentives of those taking part in a war rarely align towards peace. The same applies to external actors, for whom the cost of war is often relatively low. Chaos may well serve an external third party’s interests, particularly if peace would mean its purported proxy or proxies losing influence to the allies and proxies of regional or international rivals. Enlightened self-interest of the kind policymakers hope to encourage is thus lacking.