Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Perspective: Arabia Infelix: The War Devouring Yemen, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

For many centuries, European cartographers labeled the southwest corner of the otherwise mostly desert Arabian Peninsula as Arabia Felix, or “Happy Arabia.” It was a place where towering mountains trapped clouds blown in from the Indian Ocean so that twice-annual monsoon rains blessed terraced slopes and lowland wadis with plentiful crops. Sadly, since fighting engulfed the country in late March 2015, Yemen has never been less felix.

[Introduction To] Arabia Incognita, Sheila Carapico

Bookshelf

In 2011, millions of Yemenis calling themselves the Peaceful Youth joyfully joined the “Arab Spring.” Four years later, popular aspirations for social justice and a serious attempt at national dialogue were thwarted by deadly domestic power struggles. When the pro-Saudi, US-supported government fled to Riyadh in April 2015, the Kingdom led a multinational military intervention inside Yemen. By December, daily bombardment had killed thousands of fighters and civilians, injured and displaced hundreds of thousands, and decimated homes and infrastructure. A naval blockade cut off access to fuel, medicine, and food for millions. In addition to this humanitarian catastrophe, the ensuing …

Yemen Between Revolution And Counter-Terrorism, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

This chapter juxtaposes these seemingly two quite different storylines - one about Yemeni aspirations for social justice and better governance and the other about American and Saudi operations undertaken in the name of combating terrorism. The so-called GCC Initiative, and in particular the National Dialogue Conference process playing out as this book goes to press, provides the link between them. From the perspective of domestic politics, the Dialogue can be read as the outcome of agitation by the new generation of 'peaceful youth', as well as an outgrowth of Yemen's tradition of dialogue - an historic effort to resolve crisis …

Yemen, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

In February 2011, Tawakkol Karman stood on a stage outside Sanaa University. A microphone in one hand and the other clenched defiantly above her head, reading from a list of demands, she led tens of thousands of cheering, flag-waving demonstrators in calls for peaceful political change. She was to become not so much the leader as the figurehead of Yemen's uprising. On other days and in other cities, other citizens led the chants: men and women and sometimes, for effect, little children. These mass public performances enacted a veritable civic revolution in a poverty-stricken country where previous activist surges never …

No Exit: Yemen's Existential Crisis, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

A venal dictatorship three decades old, mutinous army officers, dissident tribal sheikhs, a parliamentary opposition coalition, youthful pro-democracy activists, gray-haired Socialists, gun-toting cowboys, veiled women protesters, northern carpetbaggers, Shi‘i insurgents, tear gas canisters, leaked State Department cables, foreign-born jihadis -- Yemen’s demi-revolutionary spring has it all. The mass uprising in southern Arabia blends features of the peaceful popular revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia with elements of the state repression in Libya and Syria in a gaudy, fast-paced, multi-layered theater of revolt verging on the absurd.

No Quick Fix: Foreign Aid And State Performance In Yemen, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

few of the world's poorest countries better exemplify American interests in government performance than Yemen. Long overshadowed by its oilrich Persian Gulf neighbors, Yemen gained attention as both an occasional target and a natural haven for militant regional paramilitary groups (including but not limited to al Qaeda). Headlines were made at a time when development analysts were already worried about ecological and economic stresses exacerbated by the strains of structural adjustment and critical water scarcity. In view of these circumstances, analysts began wondering if Yemen is an example of the combustible mix of poor governance and economic stagnation that could …

Some Yemeni Ideas About Human Rights, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

Yemeni intellectuals voiced human rights concerns throughout the twentieth century. Of course, as elsewhere, the early incarnations of a human rights movement in this most populous corner of Arabia did not use the term huquq al-insan (human rights), popularized only in the 1990s. Moreover, the emphasis was consistently on limiting arbitrary governance and justice. Still, Yemenis tackled issues such as social equality, popular participation, judicial autonomy, due process, prison conditions, and intellectual freedom, among others. This chapter explores how a fragmented yet tenacious intellectual movement grounded in indigenous political culture produced writings intended to breach authoritarianism for over half a …

The Dialectics Of Fashion: Gender And Politics In Yemen, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

The situation of Yemeni women is complicated and contradictory. On the one hand, compared with relatively fashionforward Mediterranean Arabs, or even their affluent sisters in the Gulf, Yemeni women appear to be especially oldfashioned. One rarely sees a Yemeni woman outdoors bareheaded, and in the capital, Sana'a, most women cover their faces in public. Yet outward appearances can be misleading. While it is tempting to assume that women "still" veil because "tradition" tells them to, it is simply wrong to conclude that "traditionally" all women were secluded in their homes, or that how they dress now tells us much about …

Passports And Passages: Tests Of Yemeni Women's Citizenship Rights, Sheila Carapico, Anna Wuerth

Political Science Faculty Publications

Rights and legal status are often tested at the margins. Questions are less likely to arise about how general principles apply under ordinary circumstances than about how specific articles of particular laws speak to unusual situations. The test of legal status comes through case law in the form of judgments about claims made in the context of specific, even peculiar, fact sequences. Rights are affirmed or asserted on behalf of social groups when courts or tribunals find that they have been violated in individual cases. So it is, too, with citizen rights for Yemeni women. Under ordinary circumstances the daughters …

Pluralism, Polarization, And Popular Politics In Yemen, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

Among the nations of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen is the most populous, the poorest, and the most politically liberal. It is the only republic where sovereignty theoretically rests with its 16 million inhabitants, not with a monarch. The constitution promulgated in 1991 and amended in 1994 guarantees many basic rights and liberties to all adult citizens, including rights to vote, run for office, and join political parties. Since Yemeni unification in 1990, two rounds of contested, multiparty parliamentary elections in 1993 and 1997 involved women as well as men in the political process as voters, candidates, volunteers, and reporters. Yemenis …

Gender And Status Inequalities In Yemen: Honour, Economics, And Politics, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

The aim of this national case study, a synthetic summary of the work and evidence on women in a tribal, Muslim, Arabian, rapidly changing society, is to contribute to the intersection of the Middle Eastern and women-in-development literatures by situating women first within tribal and Islamic settings and then in the context of rapid changes in political and economic circumstances during the past thirty years. It therefore considers feminine roles in the different historical social strata before examining how new services brought by modernization, class formation associated with the penetration of capitalism, and political struggles between right and left all …

Bidayat Al-Mujtama' Al-Madani Fi Al-Yaman, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Yemen: Human Rights In Yemen During And After The 1994 War, Sheila Carapico, Jermera Rone

Political Science Faculty Publications

During seventy days of conventional warfare between the government forces commanded by the Republic of Yemen Council President, General ’Ali ’Abdallah Salih, and the separatist southern army fighting in the name of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), the government army won a military victory over the rebels and presided over the destruction of institutions and property of the former YSP-ruled People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The terms of national unity between the two Yemens, never fully resolved in either the May 1990 accord or elections in April 1993, were thus settled on the battlefield in favor of Salih’s northern-dominated military …

Elections And Mass Politics In Yemen, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

Yemen's experiment in popular parliamentary elections has shaken things up in the Arabian Peninsula, the last place on earth that the United States wants to see democracy flourish. But internal political differences, profound economic crisis and Saudi hostility puts this achievement at risk.

A Tale Of Two Families: Change In North Yemen 1977-1989, Sheila Carapico, Cynthia Myntti

Political Science Faculty Publications

Virtually every aspect of life in North Yemen has changed dramatically since 1977, including those aspects of Yemeni society which represent continuity with the past: tribalism, rural life, and use of qat.¹ The driving force for change has been economic. By 1975, Yemen was caught up in the dramatic developments that affected all Arab countries. Rising international oil prices generated enormous surpluses in the producing countries, enabling them to initiate ambitious development plans and forcing them to import workers.

The Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) was in a good position to provide those workers. In the late 1970s, one …

Self-Help And Development Planning In The Yemen Arab Republic, Sheila Carapico

Political Science Faculty Publications

Virtually all contemporary development strategies stress the importance of participation by working people in both policy formation and the benefits of economic growth. Development requires .capital formation for investment in the social and economic infrastructures. Unless development investments involve mass organization, representing broad social strata, they tend to benefit only a minority of landed, administrative, or merchant capital elites. The result is an uneven pattern of development throughout the country and very often, declining standards of living for the poor majority. Moreover, numerous studies show that "top-down" programs for involving peasants in local organizations and investment projects have rarely provided …