The Syria Podcast: Yemen, Empire and the Gulf

Mike Robinson (0:11)

Hello, and welcome once again to the Syria Podcast. I am delighted to be joined by Vanessa Beeley. Once again, welcome to the programme, Vanessa.

Vanessa Beeley (0:19)

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Robinson (0:21)

And we're absolutely delighted to be joined also by Isa Blumi, professor at Stockholm University, professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Welcome to the Syria Podcast for the first time, Isa.

Isa Blumi (0:34)

Well, thank you for the invitation. Looking forward to speaking with you on this, related to Yemen, of course.

Mike Robinson (0:41)

Well, indeed. So on a recent UK Column News, you were with us as a guest to talk about what's been going on in Yemen. People will know that this is called the Syria Podcast, but of course we are talking about what's going on in the region.

Vanessa, just give us a brief introduction here because obviously the conflict within Yemen, but certainly between Saudi Arabia and Yemen has been going on for many years. But it is a conflict that has over the years had very little coverage in mainstream press. And really when there is coverage in mainstream press, the situation is presented as being one of some kind of insurgency against the recognized government in Yemen.

Vanessa Beeley (1:29)

Yeah, exactly. Of course, this conflict has been ongoing since, I think, March 2015 after the incumbent, but largely illegitimate president who was a Saudi proxy president. Not only fled Sana'a, the capital, he went to Aden in the south and then he fled to Riyadh, and he instructed Saudi Arabia to begin the bombing of Yemen. Now, this was after the visit by Jamal Ben-Omar, the UN envoy to Yemen, who basically reported back that Yemen had resolved its political issues. Constitutionally, there was no need for any aggression. So, the Saudi aggression against Yemen was of course illegal from the very beginning. One of the projects that Mansour Hadi had been tasked with instigating in Yemen was the partitioning of the country into sectarian statelets, isolating what is described by Western media as the Houthi movement in one state, given the name of Azzal, which would be effectively isolated both from the maritime corridor and from Yemen's natural and oil and energy resources.

Of course, what we are seeing in Western media, and I'd very much like Isa to talk about this, is we were talking before we started recording, that people are very confused about Yemen for a number of reasons. There's very little historical context easily available. The media portrays it, of course, as a sectarian war, just as they did in Syria, just as they did previously in Iraq.

It is reduced down to being the Houthis against Saudi Arabia, which of course is kind of ridiculous. The Ansarullah movement is a coalition resistance movement. It's a Yemeni popular movement. The government itself, Isa can maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard previously it's made up of a coalition of 38 political and tribal parties or factions. And so I guess really I'd like Isa to step in here and talk about why is, I mean, obviously we know why the narrative is skewed towards Saudi Arabia and towards the US-UK Israeli project in Yemen, for sure. But why in the academic world, particularly, is there so little balance on the portrayal of the Yemeni struggle, basically?

Isa Blumi (4:34)

Well, again, thank you for allowing me to participate in this conversation. It certainly does have a lot to do with the larger region, what has been transpiring in Yemen, I argue extends further back than a 2015 moment of, let's say, realization of a long-term campaign to undermine Yemeni's ability to negotiate on their own terms, a relationship with the larger world.

I share this sentiment of Vanessa's dog growling at how the world functions, and growling at my, I guess, still colleagues in larger academia, because unfortunately, there's very little rewards for those who actually take up a position that is counter-narrative. In the case of Yemen, in some other settings, there is some cache to mobilize your capacities to take a anti-imperialist position. But with regards to Yemen, it is so much off-the-radar screen of even those who are in other contexts quite sympathetic to the critique we have about imperialism that it leads myself and a couple of others, not necessarily in Yemeni studies, but on the fringes, if you will, of mainstream Middle East studies generally, to question the framework, the discourse, the epistemologies that we use to confront empire and imperialism in academia. And I highlight this because the way academia has been structured since the Cold War, we know that the social sciences is largely a set of disciplines that emerged first in Rockefeller-funded universities in North America. Robert Vitalis has written quite extensively about this, as did Richard Price regarding anthropology in particular. Other anthropologists have regularly critiqued these disciplines for constantly reducing the larger world to neatly framed categories that are reductive, overtly racist, what would be called orientalist in some, maybe more familiar to your audience. But Yemen has long been treated as a zone of medieval, underdeveloped, backward peoples who are resistant to development, to modernization, to transition into the 20th century. That's long been the discourse about Yemenis. And this has been actually a useful framework for those who would claim ownership over the discussions about Yemen, so scholars who have a certain expertise that is distinctive from scholars working on other parts of the Middle East or other parts of the Global South, or therefore have a monopoly on how we talk about Yemen. And they regularly and habitually and very problematically resort to framing Yemen in terms of tribalism, in terms of sectarianism, in terms of this developmental backwardness. And that is more or less mirrored and echoed, the larger campaigns to try to subordinate Yemeni independence and force it into this process that we have called, since the Cold War modernization, globalization, and kind of a neo, now it's now called neo-liberal trajectory, where Yemen's natural resources, its human resources, are serviceable to a larger economic project.