Asher Orkaby
Biographic Data
| ID | 1010161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Asher Orkaby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Asher |
| FAMILY NAME | Orkaby |
| SIGNATURE | ORKABY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5865-9439 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Local Participatory Development Models For Postwar Reconstruction in Yemen
The humanitarian crisis that has come to dominate public perception of Yemen since 2015 has left the country's social and civil infrastructure in major disrepair. Postwar recovery and reconstruction will be an essential component of long‐term stability in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea subregions. The unchecked distribution of large sums of foreign aid to postwar Yemen has the potential to perpetuate the country's underlying political conflicts wit…
Yemen
Journal Article Yemen: poverty and conflict; Yemen in the shadow of transition: pursuing justice amid war Get access Yemen: poverty and conflict. By Helen Lackner. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2022. 184pp. £130.00. Isbn978 0 36718 049 2. Available as e-book.Yemen in the shadow of transition: pursuing justice amid war. By Stacey Philbrick Yadav. London: Hurst. 2022. 288pp. £50.00. Isbn978 1 78738 813 0. Available as e-book. Asher Orkaby Asher…
Revolutionary Decades
How have perceptions of Yemen's 1962 revolution changed since the modern state's founding and how has the government attempted to control historical memory? A comparison of al-Thawra , the Yemeni republic's first modern newspaper, and a 40th anniversary conference in 2002 reveals how Yemen failed to reconcile the bloody legacy of its revolution. This failure allowed tensions — between tribes and the government and between regional factions — to u…
Pascal Menoret. Graveyard of Clerics
Journal Article Pascal Menoret. Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia. Get access Pascal Menoret. Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Pp. 250. Paper $24.00. Asher Orkaby Asher Orkaby Princeton University Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, Mar…
Yemen
This book provides a broad-ranging, historical overview of Yemen and its peoples that focuses in particular on the contemporary situation. It covers the country's major political figures and ethnic groups, explaining the origins of each and their impact on contemporary national politics. Throughout, the book discusses tribalism, religious dynamics, regional identities, Yemen's African and Jewish minorities, and the social impact of the Arab Sprin…
Regions, Sects, and Tribes
This chapter discusses the different regions, sects, and tribes in Yemen. The Shafi'i school of thought, named after the jurist Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i, is the most prevalent religious sect in Yemen and can also be found in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Levant, and Egypt. In the 9th century CE, Yahya bin Hussein al-Hadi, a prominent religious scholar from the city of Madinah, brought Shi'i Islam to the highlands of Yemen, where it has rem…
The Death of Sodium Pentothal
For nearly a century, sodium pentothal was the undisputed king of anesthetics. Anesthesiologists were not, however, the sole consumers of pentothal, as psychiatrists used it to treat acute anxiety during psychoanalysis. The associated drug-induced inhibitions were attractive not only to psychotherapists, but also to a new generation of policing and Cold War espionage searching for the elusive truth serum. Cameo appearances of pentothal in media, …
Beyond Paradigms
September 26, 1962, marked the end of a thousand-year religious dynasty in Yemen. Muhammad al-Badr, the last ruling imam, was overthrown and replaced by a weak republic. Over the next six years, Yemen was dominated by a civil war between al-Badr’s royalists and the supporters of the new republic. The conflict in Yemen did not conform to the ideological divides of either the Global Cold War, between the United States and the USSR, or the Arab Cold…
Nasser’s Cage
The 1964 Arab Summit and subsequent Egyptian-Saudi agreements appeared to mark the end of Egypt’s military adventure in Yemen. In 1965, however, Nasser reneged on his commitment to withdraw, declaring instead his “long-breath strategy” to remain in Yemen indefinitely. Nasser’s decision to stay in Yemen was encouraged by financial incentives from US President Johnson and Soviet Chairman Brezhnev, who preferred to keep Nasser’s aggressive foreign p…
The UN Yemen Observer Mission (Unyom)
In 1963, the “shuttle diplomacy” efforts of Ellsworth Bunker and Ralph Bunche between Riyadh, Cairo, and Sana’a led to an agreement for the withdrawal of Egyptian and Saudi intervention in the Yemen Civil War. The UN Yemen Observer Mission, which ran from 1963 to 1964, was given the responsibility to oversee this withdrawal. Contemporary and historic perceptions of UNYOM have been tainted by a clash of personalities between the mission leader, Ca…
The Anglo-Egyptian Rivalry in Yemen
The Yemen Civil War brought about the end of the British Empire and represented the final stage of an Anglo-Egyptian rivalry that had begun with Lord Palmerston’s 1839 conquest of Aden and the struggle against Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian army. Post-WWII British foreign policy had, until the end of the 1960s, been strongly influenced by the Conservative Suez Group, later renamed the Aden Group, which wasvehemently anti-Nasser. Members of the Aden Grou…
International Intrigue and the Origins of September 1962
The 1962 revolution in Yemen has often been attributed to the machinations of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The events of September 1962 were in a manifestation of two decades of growing Yemeni nationalism fostered by an educated cadre of expatriates known as the Famous Forty. Prior to the outbreak of war in 1962, Yemen had been drawn into the growing Cold War conflict. The Soviet Union paid for the construction of the new Hodeidah port …
The Impact of Individuals
No single foreign or domestic power was able to exercise control over events in Yemen, which created an opportunity for many to have a lasting presence in South Arabia. Three individuals, in particular, made inroads in Yemen that impacted the course of the civil war and the future of the country: Bruce Condé, an eclectic American philatelist, became postmaster general of Imam al-Badr’s tribal areas and singlehandedly brought tribal nonstate actor…
Yemen, Israel, and the Road to 1967
Nasser’s decision to completely withdraw from Yemen was brought about by Egypt’s defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel. Egyptian military officials have often blamed their 1967 defeat on Yemen, citing spurious statistics on troop numbers abroad and Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer’s misdirected attention from the Sinai border with Israel. While most of these assertions lack credibility, there was in fact a direct connection between Yemen and June…
Chemical Warfare in Yemen
Nasser’s “long-breath strategy” from 1966 through the end of 1967 was focused on maintaining the security of the strategic triangle while using fewer troops. Instead, an intensive bombing campaign that included poison gas was used to target the vast royalist cave network in North Yemen. Despite Egypt’s violation of the Geneva Protocols of 1925, the international community failed to condemn the use of chemical weapons, demonstrating the tenacity o…
Local Hostilities and International Diplomacy
During the early months of the civil war, Yemen’s mountainous terrain was a particular challenge for the Egyptian army, which was equipped for desert warfare. By the beginning of 1963, Nasser had begun to employ a counterinsurgency strategy against royalist tribal armies that relied on Egypt’s overwhelming advantage in artillery and air power. Between 1963 and 1964, Egypt launched the Ramadan and Haradh offensives in an attempt to conquer norther…
The Siege of Sana’a and the End of the Yemen Civil War
As Egyptian troops withdrew from Yemen in November 1967, Imam al-Badr’s royalist armies descended upon Sana’a to overthrow the republic. The subsequent seventy-day siege served as a defining moment for Yemen. The heroic efforts of Hassan al-‘Amri and timely Soviet airlifts helped defend the capital city and create the revolutionary ethos that defined the Yemeni republic for the next six decades. The lifting of the siege in February 1968 was the f…
Recognizing the New Republic
The deposed Yemeni Imam Muhammad al-Badr escaped the shelling of his palace in September 1962 and fled north to gather loyal tribal militias. By the time al-Badr’s escape was revealed to the public, two months after the initial assault on Sana’a, most of the world had already recognized the new republic, under the assumption that al-Badr was dead. Egypt and the Soviet Union, which had both developed a close alliance with al-Badr before 1962, were…
Epilogue
The war in Yemen that began in 2014 between northern tribes and the exiled republic is the bookend to six decades of conflict that began in 1962. The Houthi northern tribal alliance is a modern reincarnation of the royalists who had supported Imam al-Badr during the 1960s. The Houthis see themselves as rectifying the unjust political settlements left over from the Yemen Civil War. The current conflict reached a turning point with a tribal conques…
Beyond the Arab Cold War
Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. 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 sho…
The North Yemen civil war and the failure of the Federation of South Arabia
The emergence of Yemeni nationalism during the civil war in North Yemen (1962--70) inspired the southern revolutionary movement that contributed to the defeat of the British Empire in South Yemen. Drawn to the expanding war, a steady stream of transnational organizations, media correspondents and clandestine organizations turned South Arabia into an arena of global conflict, with Aden serving as the main gateway to the battleground. The actions o…
Israel’s International Squadron and the “Never Again” Mentality
Israel’s International Squadron 120, founded in 1964, embodied the “Never Again” post-Holocaust imperative of Israel’s identity ahead of its adoption on a national level. Beginning with an airlift mission to Yemen’s northern highlands in 1964, the squadron emerged as the long arm of Israel’s foreign policy during the nation’s “golden era” of the 1960s and subsequent decades. Through the continued influence of its early members, many of whom were …
The 1964 Israeli Airlift to Yemen and the Expansion of Weapons Diplomacy
Based on oral history accounts of surviving members of Israel[#x02019]s first International Squadron and organisers of the military airlift to Yemen in 1964, this analysis examines the origins of the squadron, its mission to Yemen, and its impact on Israeli foreign policy in Africa. The founding of the International Squadron in 1963 incorporated the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser into the Israeli air force and gave the military and Foreign Ministry the…
The Yemeni Civil War
When the Yemeni Civil War broke out in September 1962, the British and the Egyptians supported opposing sides of this regional conflict whose outcome would determine the future of their respective Arabian empires. Hostilities in Yemen were not grounded in the superpower competition of the Cold War, but rather were a culmination of an imperial rivalry that began with the 1839 British capture of the port city of Aden to confront the advancing imper…
Where Have All the Craftsmen Gone
For well over a century, Yemen was forcibly politically and economically isolated from the modernizing Middle East region surrounding it. The large-scale and hurried exodus of the Jewish population of craftsmen in 1949 inadvertently provided the impetus and the means to internationalize the consumer economy in Yemen. According to trade data from the British colony of Aden, in the years immediately following the Jewish exodus, there was a signific…
The North Yemen civil war and the failure of the Federation of South Arabia
The emergence of Yemeni nationalism during the civil war in North Yemen (1962--70) inspired the southern revolutionary movement that contributed to the defeat of the British Empire in South Yemen. Drawn to the expanding war, a steady stream of transnational organizations, media correspondents and clandestine organizations turned South Arabia into an arena of global conflict, with Aden serving as the main gateway to the battleground. The actions o…
The Yemeni Civil War
When the Yemeni Civil War broke out in September 1962, the British and the Egyptians supported opposing sides of this regional conflict whose outcome would determine the future of their respective Arabian empires. Hostilities in Yemen were not grounded in the superpower competition of the Cold War, but rather were a culmination of an imperial rivalry that began with the 1839 British capture of the port city of Aden to confront the advancing imper…
Local Participatory Development Models For Postwar Reconstruction in Yemen
The humanitarian crisis that has come to dominate public perception of Yemen since 2015 has left the country's social and civil infrastructure in major disrepair. Postwar recovery and reconstruction will be an essential component of long‐term stability in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea subregions. The unchecked distribution of large sums of foreign aid to postwar Yemen has the potential to perpetuate the country's underlying political conflicts wit…
Where Have All the Craftsmen Gone
For well over a century, Yemen was forcibly politically and economically isolated from the modernizing Middle East region surrounding it. The large-scale and hurried exodus of the Jewish population of craftsmen in 1949 inadvertently provided the impetus and the means to internationalize the consumer economy in Yemen. According to trade data from the British colony of Aden, in the years immediately following the Jewish exodus, there was a signific…
The Yemeni Civil War
When the Yemeni Civil War broke out in September 1962, the British and the Egyptians supported opposing sides of this regional conflict whose outcome would determine the future of their respective Arabian empires. Hostilities in Yemen were not grounded in the superpower competition of the Cold War, but rather were a culmination of an imperial rivalry that began with the 1839 British capture of the port city of Aden to confront the advancing imper…
Israel’s International Squadron and the “Never Again” Mentality
Israel’s International Squadron 120, founded in 1964, embodied the “Never Again” post-Holocaust imperative of Israel’s identity ahead of its adoption on a national level. Beginning with an airlift mission to Yemen’s northern highlands in 1964, the squadron emerged as the long arm of Israel’s foreign policy during the nation’s “golden era” of the 1960s and subsequent decades. Through the continued influence of its early members, many of whom were …
The 1964 Israeli Airlift to Yemen and the Expansion of Weapons Diplomacy
Based on oral history accounts of surviving members of Israel[#x02019]s first International Squadron and organisers of the military airlift to Yemen in 1964, this analysis examines the origins of the squadron, its mission to Yemen, and its impact on Israeli foreign policy in Africa. The founding of the International Squadron in 1963 incorporated the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser into the Israeli air force and gave the military and Foreign Ministry the…
The North Yemen civil war and the failure of the Federation of South Arabia
The emergence of Yemeni nationalism during the civil war in North Yemen (1962--70) inspired the southern revolutionary movement that contributed to the defeat of the British Empire in South Yemen. Drawn to the expanding war, a steady stream of transnational organizations, media correspondents and clandestine organizations turned South Arabia into an arena of global conflict, with Aden serving as the main gateway to the battleground. The actions o…
Beyond Paradigms
September 26, 1962, marked the end of a thousand-year religious dynasty in Yemen. Muhammad al-Badr, the last ruling imam, was overthrown and replaced by a weak republic. Over the next six years, Yemen was dominated by a civil war between al-Badr’s royalists and the supporters of the new republic. The conflict in Yemen did not conform to the ideological divides of either the Global Cold War, between the United States and the USSR, or the Arab Cold…
Nasser’s Cage
The 1964 Arab Summit and subsequent Egyptian-Saudi agreements appeared to mark the end of Egypt’s military adventure in Yemen. In 1965, however, Nasser reneged on his commitment to withdraw, declaring instead his “long-breath strategy” to remain in Yemen indefinitely. Nasser’s decision to stay in Yemen was encouraged by financial incentives from US President Johnson and Soviet Chairman Brezhnev, who preferred to keep Nasser’s aggressive foreign p…
The UN Yemen Observer Mission (Unyom)
In 1963, the “shuttle diplomacy” efforts of Ellsworth Bunker and Ralph Bunche between Riyadh, Cairo, and Sana’a led to an agreement for the withdrawal of Egyptian and Saudi intervention in the Yemen Civil War. The UN Yemen Observer Mission, which ran from 1963 to 1964, was given the responsibility to oversee this withdrawal. Contemporary and historic perceptions of UNYOM have been tainted by a clash of personalities between the mission leader, Ca…
The Anglo-Egyptian Rivalry in Yemen
The Yemen Civil War brought about the end of the British Empire and represented the final stage of an Anglo-Egyptian rivalry that had begun with Lord Palmerston’s 1839 conquest of Aden and the struggle against Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian army. Post-WWII British foreign policy had, until the end of the 1960s, been strongly influenced by the Conservative Suez Group, later renamed the Aden Group, which wasvehemently anti-Nasser. Members of the Aden Grou…
International Intrigue and the Origins of September 1962
The 1962 revolution in Yemen has often been attributed to the machinations of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The events of September 1962 were in a manifestation of two decades of growing Yemeni nationalism fostered by an educated cadre of expatriates known as the Famous Forty. Prior to the outbreak of war in 1962, Yemen had been drawn into the growing Cold War conflict. The Soviet Union paid for the construction of the new Hodeidah port …
The Impact of Individuals
No single foreign or domestic power was able to exercise control over events in Yemen, which created an opportunity for many to have a lasting presence in South Arabia. Three individuals, in particular, made inroads in Yemen that impacted the course of the civil war and the future of the country: Bruce Condé, an eclectic American philatelist, became postmaster general of Imam al-Badr’s tribal areas and singlehandedly brought tribal nonstate actor…
Yemen, Israel, and the Road to 1967
Nasser’s decision to completely withdraw from Yemen was brought about by Egypt’s defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel. Egyptian military officials have often blamed their 1967 defeat on Yemen, citing spurious statistics on troop numbers abroad and Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer’s misdirected attention from the Sinai border with Israel. While most of these assertions lack credibility, there was in fact a direct connection between Yemen and June…
Chemical Warfare in Yemen
Nasser’s “long-breath strategy” from 1966 through the end of 1967 was focused on maintaining the security of the strategic triangle while using fewer troops. Instead, an intensive bombing campaign that included poison gas was used to target the vast royalist cave network in North Yemen. Despite Egypt’s violation of the Geneva Protocols of 1925, the international community failed to condemn the use of chemical weapons, demonstrating the tenacity o…
Local Hostilities and International Diplomacy
During the early months of the civil war, Yemen’s mountainous terrain was a particular challenge for the Egyptian army, which was equipped for desert warfare. By the beginning of 1963, Nasser had begun to employ a counterinsurgency strategy against royalist tribal armies that relied on Egypt’s overwhelming advantage in artillery and air power. Between 1963 and 1964, Egypt launched the Ramadan and Haradh offensives in an attempt to conquer norther…
The Siege of Sana’a and the End of the Yemen Civil War
As Egyptian troops withdrew from Yemen in November 1967, Imam al-Badr’s royalist armies descended upon Sana’a to overthrow the republic. The subsequent seventy-day siege served as a defining moment for Yemen. The heroic efforts of Hassan al-‘Amri and timely Soviet airlifts helped defend the capital city and create the revolutionary ethos that defined the Yemeni republic for the next six decades. The lifting of the siege in February 1968 was the f…
Recognizing the New Republic
The deposed Yemeni Imam Muhammad al-Badr escaped the shelling of his palace in September 1962 and fled north to gather loyal tribal militias. By the time al-Badr’s escape was revealed to the public, two months after the initial assault on Sana’a, most of the world had already recognized the new republic, under the assumption that al-Badr was dead. Egypt and the Soviet Union, which had both developed a close alliance with al-Badr before 1962, were…
Epilogue
The war in Yemen that began in 2014 between northern tribes and the exiled republic is the bookend to six decades of conflict that began in 1962. The Houthi northern tribal alliance is a modern reincarnation of the royalists who had supported Imam al-Badr during the 1960s. The Houthis see themselves as rectifying the unjust political settlements left over from the Yemen Civil War. The current conflict reached a turning point with a tribal conques…
Beyond the Arab Cold War
Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. 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 sho…
Yemen
This book provides a broad-ranging, historical overview of Yemen and its peoples that focuses in particular on the contemporary situation. It covers the country's major political figures and ethnic groups, explaining the origins of each and their impact on contemporary national politics. Throughout, the book discusses tribalism, religious dynamics, regional identities, Yemen's African and Jewish minorities, and the social impact of the Arab Sprin…
Regions, Sects, and Tribes
This chapter discusses the different regions, sects, and tribes in Yemen. The Shafi'i school of thought, named after the jurist Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i, is the most prevalent religious sect in Yemen and can also be found in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Levant, and Egypt. In the 9th century CE, Yahya bin Hussein al-Hadi, a prominent religious scholar from the city of Madinah, brought Shi'i Islam to the highlands of Yemen, where it has rem…
The Death of Sodium Pentothal
For nearly a century, sodium pentothal was the undisputed king of anesthetics. Anesthesiologists were not, however, the sole consumers of pentothal, as psychiatrists used it to treat acute anxiety during psychoanalysis. The associated drug-induced inhibitions were attractive not only to psychotherapists, but also to a new generation of policing and Cold War espionage searching for the elusive truth serum. Cameo appearances of pentothal in media, …
Revolutionary Decades
How have perceptions of Yemen's 1962 revolution changed since the modern state's founding and how has the government attempted to control historical memory? A comparison of al-Thawra , the Yemeni republic's first modern newspaper, and a 40th anniversary conference in 2002 reveals how Yemen failed to reconcile the bloody legacy of its revolution. This failure allowed tensions — between tribes and the government and between regional factions — to u…
Pascal Menoret. Graveyard of Clerics
Journal Article Pascal Menoret. Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia. Get access Pascal Menoret. Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Pp. 250. Paper $24.00. Asher Orkaby Asher Orkaby Princeton University Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, Mar…
Yemen
Journal Article Yemen: poverty and conflict; Yemen in the shadow of transition: pursuing justice amid war Get access Yemen: poverty and conflict. By Helen Lackner. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2022. 184pp. £130.00. Isbn978 0 36718 049 2. Available as e-book.Yemen in the shadow of transition: pursuing justice amid war. By Stacey Philbrick Yadav. London: Hurst. 2022. 288pp. £50.00. Isbn978 1 78738 813 0. Available as e-book. Asher Orkaby Asher…
Local Participatory Development Models For Postwar Reconstruction in Yemen
The humanitarian crisis that has come to dominate public perception of Yemen since 2015 has left the country's social and civil infrastructure in major disrepair. Postwar recovery and reconstruction will be an essential component of long‐term stability in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea subregions. The unchecked distribution of large sums of foreign aid to postwar Yemen has the potential to perpetuate the country's underlying political conflicts wit…
Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (23 works) · History (21 works) · Politics (18 works) · Ancient history (17 works) · Geography (12 works) · Spanish Civil War (12 works) · Economic history (11 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (9 works)