BiblioVault - Books about Yemen

Architectural Heritage of Yemen

Buildings that Fill My Eye

Edited by Trevor H. J. Marchand

Gingko, 2017

Generations of highly skilled masons, carpenters and craftspeople have deftly employed local materials and indigenous technologies to create urban architectural assemblages, gardens, and rural landscapes that dialogue harmoniously with the natural contours and geological conditions of Yemen. Unfortunately, a sharp escalation in military action and violence in the country since the 1990s has had a devastating impact on the region’s rich cultural heritage. In bringing together the astute observations and reflections of an international and interdisciplinary group of acclaimed scholars, this book aims to raise awareness of Yemen’s long history of cultural creativity and the urgent need for international collaboration to protect it and its people from the destructive forces that have beset the region.

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Peripheral Visions

Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen

Lisa Wedeen

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The government of Yemen, unified since 1990, remains largely incapable of controlling violence or providing goods and services to its population, but the regime continues to endure despite its fragility and peripheral location in the global political and economic order. Revealing what holds Yemen together in such tenuous circumstances, Peripheral Visions shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions.

Lisa Wedeen, who spent a year and a half in Yemen observing and interviewing its residents, argues that national solidarity in such weak states tends to arise not from attachments to institutions but through both extraordinary events and the ordinary activities of everyday life. Yemenis, for example, regularly gather to chew qat, a leafy drug similar to caffeine, as they engage in wide-ranging and sometimes influential public discussions of even the most divisive political and social issues. These lively debates exemplify Wedeen’s contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry’s shared points of reference. Ultimately, her skillful evocations of such practices shift attention away from a narrow focus on government institutions and electoral competition and toward the substantive experience of participatory politics.

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A Tribal Order

Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen

By Shelagh Weir

University of Texas Press, 2006

2008 — British-Kuwait Friendship Prize in Middle Eastern Studies – British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

A Tribal Order describes the politico-legal system of Jabal Razih, a remote massif in northern Yemen inhabited by farmers and traders. Contrary to the popular image of Middle Eastern tribes as warlike, lawless, and invariably opposed to states, the tribes of Razih have stable structures of governance and elaborate laws and procedures for maintaining order and resolving conflicts with a minimum of physical violence. Razihi leaders also historically cooperated with states, provided the latter respected their customs, ideals, and interests. Weir considers this system in the context of the rugged environment and productive agricultural economy of Razih, and of centuries of continuous rule by Zaydi Muslim regimes and (latterly) the republican governments of Yemen.

The book is based on Weir's extended anthropological fieldwork on Jabal Razih, and on her detailed study of hundreds of handwritten contracts and treaties among and between the tribes and rulers of Razih. These documents provide a fascinating insight into tribal politics and law, as well as state-tribe relations, from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century. A Tribal Order is also enriched by case histories that vividly illuminate tribal practices. Overall, this unusually wide-ranging work provides an accessible account of a remarkable Arabian society through time.

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What Factors Cause Individuals to Reject Violent Extremism in Yemen?

Eric Robinson

RAND Corporation, 2017

Why do some individuals engage in political violence in Yemen, while others do not? We examine the role that social, political, and economic factors play on individual behavior toward violence in the midst of Yemen’s bloody and multiyear civil war. We use a unique national survey conducted in Yemen in 2016 to better understand why Yemenis may reject political violence despite persistent conflict and civil unrest across the country.

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