Reckoning with Revolutionary Yemen Under Saudi-American Bombs

This critical study investigates why the US-backed Saudi-led coalition began bombing Yemen in 2015 and who represent the main protagonists and targets of the military intervention. How was an illegal military campaign resulting in the worst human-made humanitarian crisis in a century allowed to happen? A so-called proxy war involving Ansar Allah (the Houthis) who receive support from Iran, the rhetorical trigger of the intervention was the state coup in 2014 by Ansar Allah and Yemen’s deposed authoritarian leader, Saleh, that left the ’internationally recognized’ government of Hadi confined to the south, and the Ansar Allah-dominated coalition the de facto power in the north. The facilitating conditions of Yemen’s civil war and its internationalization are traced back multifariously to the hijacking of the democratic Youth Revolution of 2011 by US-Saudi-backed Yemeni elites, Saleh’s Saudi-funded war against the Houthis in the 2000s, and the Republican Revolution of 1962 that overthrew the Imamate. US imperialism, Saudi regional ambition, and the Gulf oil monarchies’ determination to keep Yemen weak are, by a global neoliberal corporate monopoly capitalism, hinged to a Yemeni tribal republic constituted by decentralized, neopatrimonial power structured by a kleptocratic-tribal-military nexus. Non-tribal Ansar Allah represent Saudi Arabia’s greatest dread: Yemeni autonomy.

Nalini Persram is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, Canada.