Understanding the Crisis in Yemen: Evaluating Competing Narratives
In 2014, Yemen was referred to as one of the success stories of the Arab Spring. Yet, within months a rebel group, the Huthis, took over the capital and the Yemeni state nearly collapsed. Analyses of the crisis in Yemen have routinely reproduced one of three narratives: the Saudi-Iranian proxy war narrative, the sectarian narrative or the al-Qaeda/failed state narrative. However, a closer look shows that the onset of the crisis, although complex, is mainly driven by local factors and related to the lack of political and economic reforms after the transition in Yemen following the uprising in 2011.
Yemen's Arab Spring – Democratic Opening or Regime Maintenance?
Yemen's revolt of 2011, like its counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, raises many questions about recent analysis of authoritarianism in the Arab world. The long-standing regime of Ali Abdullah al-Saleh and his General People's Congress (GPC) party seemed to represent a classic case of authoritarian upgrading. The surprisingly open political system in Yemen, which followed the emergence of the new state in 1990, masked the extent to which the president exerted control through a network of informal alliances and, in recent years, external support and patronage. The widespread and persistent protests against the regime which led ultimately to a handover of power to Saleh's vice-president and the formation of a government of national unity between the GPC and the opposition, seem to constitute yet another set of challenges to the theses of authoritarian upgrading and Arab hostility to democracy. However, the narrative of popular protest leading to the demise of a reviled authoritarian regime received a setback as the Yemeni situation developed. The protest movement, which emerged, in the first instance, from outside established centres of political activity, was quickly overtaken and marginalized both by the established parties of opposition and by tribal actors. While Saleh's exit from office represents a major rupture in Yemeni political life, the future is best read in terms of the reassertion of pre-existing political dynamics, both domestic and international rather than in hopeful but unfounded expectations of democratic transformation.
The Invention of the Jewish People
'All modern nation states have a story of their origins, passed down through both official and popular culture, and yet few of these accounts have proved as divisive and influential as the Israeli national myth. The well-known tale of Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans during the first century AD, and the assertion of both cultural and racial continuity through to the Jewish people of the present day, resonates far beyond Israel's borders. Despite its use as a justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine and the project of a Greater Israel, there have been few scholarly investigations into the historical accuracy of the story as a whole. In this bold and ambitious new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times - when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation. Sand forensically dissects the official story - and demonstrates the construction of a nationalist myth and the collective mystification that this requires. A bestseller in Israel and France, Shlomo Sand's book has sparked a widespread and lively debate. Should the Jewish people regard themselves as genetically distinct and identifiable across the millennia - or should that doctrine now be left behind and if the myth of the Jewish state is dismantled, could this open a path toward a more inclusive Israeli state, content within its borders?'