Tribes and Politics in Yemen

A History of the Houthi Conflict

Bibliographic Data

ID19540717
AuthorsSteven C Caton (Harvard University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume9
Issue2
Pages230-234
Publication date2018-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueBustan The Middle East Book Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1878-5301 • E-ISSN: 1878-5328
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/bustan.9.2.0230
OpenAlexW4234460677
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Several years ago, I was interviewed by a correspondent from The Guardian who wanted my analysis of the Houthi rebellion. He framed it as a Sunni–Shiʿi conflict, one stoked by Iranian interference, and I tried to dissuade him from that overly simplistic explanation, one that is shared by far too many journalists. I went into an explanation of who the Houthis are, who the high-born religious elite or sādah are, to which the Houthis belong, what happened to their political position in Yemen after the 1962 revolution that ended the thousand-year-old imamate, the Yemeni ethnic composition of southwestern Saudi Arabia that complicates the kingdom's relations with Yemen and its fears of an irredentist movement, the Saudi policy of “exporting” its more extremist Wahhabi elements to places like Yemen in order to make them more Salafi and the religious tensions this produced, the reasons the Houthi political message resonated with non-Houthi elements in the population, and so on and so forth. As I was explaining all this, it crossed my mind that the Houthi phenomenon was so complex it required an entire book to be grasped, if in fact it could be grasped. Now such a book exists, and I am happy to report that it is a superb one. If ever my views should be sought again on the Houthi movement, I will simply refer them to Marieke Brandt's Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict.Of scholarly works on Yemen that attempt to explain its recent political upheavals and predicaments, two others have been published that stand out in the literature, each one with its own approach to the subject. How is Brandt's different? The most polemical, the fiercest in its political critiques of British and US policy in the region, and the most theoretically provocative, if at times oversimplistic in its use of the concept of Empire, is by the Ottomanist historian Isa Blumi, whose Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World (University of California Press, 2018) is not only a history of modern Yemen and its entanglements with colonialism but a fierce indictment of the cruel war waged in Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Houthis play a minor role in this account; however, he has discussed them in other publications.Another book that helps us understand what has been happening is by a political economist and economic development expert with long experience in Yemen going back to the early 1970s, Helen Lackner's Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State (London: Saqi Books, 2017). This is not a meta-narrative like Blumi's story about Empire in the frontiers, or a probing analysis of a single factor that has contributed to Yemen's troubles. Instead it is a more “holistic” account of the myriad problems that have bedeviled the country since the 1970s, as seen through a number of different analytical lenses and with respect to wide regional variations. If there is a villain in her story, it is a combination of modernization and a ruinous neoliberal policy that has left Yemen's economy in tatters and brought the country to its current “crisis.”And now there is the meticulous work of scholarship under review here, with its focus on the Houthi movement. It is the most anthropological of the three, even though Brandt is not an anthropologist by training. Her knowledge of anthropological research in general and on Yemen specifically runs very deep, and she uses that knowledge to inform her analysis of extraordinarily rich data culled by long-term ethnographic fieldwork she conducted herself. In the end, however, it is not an ethnographic monograph but a work of contemporary political history.Something needs to be said about the circumstances under which the fieldwork was conducted. Bearing in mind that the investigator is severely hearing impaired and has to read lips and that her vocalization is not easily understood in spite of her fluency in Arabic (none of which she mentions), it is astonishing that she managed to conduct such probing and extensive interviews with her Yemeni interlocutors. Her success should serve as an inspiration to others with disabilities who doubt they can conduct rigorous fieldwork because of them. Of course, fieldwork in Yemen can pose other hardships, none of which the author was spared either, such as conducting research in a war zone, one that intensified while Brandt was in the field (from 2003 to 2008). She stayed in the Houthi stronghold of northern Yemen (Saʾdah, Sufyān, and al-Jawfʾ), her main field site, until the risk to her personal safety became too great, and she relocated to the capital, Sanaʾa, where she continued to meet with her interlocutors to keep abreast of developments in the north. By 2013, however, the rapidly deteriorating political situation in the capital made it impossible for her to stay, at which point the ethnographic component of the research came to an end.Other than fieldwork, she also did historical archival work, as well as followed the local and national Yemeni press on the conflict from their different political angles. She tracked digital media, including YouTube and social media, something she continued to do once she left the country permanently. She dubs the latter “digital anthropology” (6) and rightly claims that it is resorted to more and more by researchers working in conflict zones such as Yemen. The result of this interdisciplinary, multi-sited, multimedia fieldwork is the richest “grounded” case study of the Houthi conflict that exists in the literature, and it is not likely to be surpassed soon, if at all.The book's academic scholarship in both Arabic and non-Arabic sources pertaining to Yemen in general and the Houthi conflict in particular is outstanding. The author is meticulous in her discussion of the rich literature on tribes in Yemen (not to mention ethnographic work on other status-groups in the country like the sādah, from whom the Houthi family traces its origins). If her attention to tribes begs the question, “Why tribes in the first place?” Brandt does not brush aside objections to this focus arising from postcolonial critical theory, but she asserts that “tribe” is not just a fantasy of the colonial archive invented to govern populations more “effectively,” for tribes have had their own notions of “tribe” and “tribalism” that they have culturally performed in any number of ways, including poetry, and long before European colonial presence. Nor does she tell this complicated story by isolating tribal developments from their relations with the state, which selectively distributed development aid to sheikhs who supported their policies (creating deep economic disparities that would be a source of resentment in the general population that the Houthis exploited in its criticisms of the regime), a state that itself was never stable but undergoing upheaval and change in the post–civil war era. A picture of tribal-state political organization emerges as quite interdependent, while also revealing allegiances that were constantly shifting depending on political contexts.The most astute parts of the book, in fact, are those where she examines certain claims made about the connection between the Houthi conflict and a particular factor, say, the Saudi-Yemeni border fence. It is argued by some scholars that the widely unpopular fence garnered support for the Houthi movement's opposition to Saudi Arabia, but Brandt's careful analysis of the tribal situation on the ground shows tribal allegiances to have been far more complex and not easily accounted for by Saudi border policies themselves, with some tribes or tribal subsections siding with Saudi Arabia, others with the Houthis. The determinate factor varied depending on the context.Brandt's analysis of local or grounded realities of tribe, religious elites, and states—Yemeni as swell as Saudi—is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides the social, economic, and political background for understanding tribal governance in northern Yemen, including the relations with the Houthi sādah on the one hand, and the central state on the other, and how these relations changed over time due to economic development, the 1962 revolution and its aftermath, tribal patronage building promulgated by long-term President ʿAli ʿAbdullah Saleh, and changing relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly over its border with Yemen. She is scrupulous about noting variations across local contexts so as not to paint with too broad a brush, yet certain overall trends do emerge which she helpfully summarizes at various points.Part 2 is a meticulous history of the Houthi-state conflict, who the Houthis were, their grievances with the central state, and how those grievances morphed into open warfare, followed by the unending oscillation between (failed) mediation and (nondecisive) violence that marked the war until roughly 2014. She explains why the Houthis, with the help of the heavily armed tribes, were not only able to hold their own militarily (even before the Iranians got involved) but even beat back government forces in the end. She explains how and why Saudi Arabia got involved in this conflict, and how and why the Iranians did. And finally, she explains how Houthi involvement in the Yemeni “Change Revolution” led to their gaining the upper hand in Yemen after the resignation of President Saleh, leading to their takeover of the capital and overrunning of most of the country (until Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened to stop their advance militarily). She ends the story in 2014, but of course the war sadly drags on with no end in sight, and meanwhile the toll to human life and the infrastructures needed to secure it, has been incalculable and unconscionable. Brandt should think about writing a sequel, one that encompasses this horrible aftermath of a conflict that perhaps will never end, and for the reason that too many parties profit from its continuation in one form or another.If there is one criticism of this book, it is that the later chapters chronicling the war will require some patience on the reader's part. The method of the first part, of painstakingly taking into account the local contexts and the intricate political relations in them, becomes mind-numbing when applied to the chronicle of the war, largely because of its repetitiveness or cyclical nature. While this takes on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy, its profound moral implications (greed, ambition, arrogance, sheer stupidity, etc.) get lost in the military and political machinery that keeps grinding on. It's not that the ins-and-outs of the escalating violence and intensified mediation efforts are not worth knowing about or, more important, that Iran started helping the Houthis with serious material support rather late in the game, or still other developments that are part of this complex history, but one's attention flags and one loses track of an argument without a larger framework within which to encompass it all. There, ironically enough, is where a Blumi-like meta-narrative might have served Brandt's purpose well. But then again, she might counter that to look for “sense” where there isn't any is simply false to historical reality. Pointless, wasteful, calamitous in nearly every way is how one might describe the conflict; other wars have been like that, too, and not for nothing is the war in Yemen often compared to US entanglement in Vietnam

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