Review of Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (London: Hurst and Co., 2022).
Greifswald, Germany (Special to Informed Comment) – In a context of war, do accountability and justice need to wait until the end of the conflict? In her well-researched and original book Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War, Stacey Philbrick Yadav answers the question above in the negative. More than eight years after the rebel Houthi movement took over Yemen’s capital Sana’a, prompting a Saudi-led intervention in March 2015, the civil war in Yemen is still ongoing. Although there has been a decrease in the intensity of the conflict during 2022 (with a six-month truce between April and October), there is no clear end to the war in sight.
Yadav, an Associate Professor of International Relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, describes in her book how, despite the enduring violent context, Yemenis have set up home-grown initiatives dedicated to the pursuit of justice. As the author notes, “Yemenis are not waiting (…) for an agreement to be struck to pursue justice claims.”[1] Yemen in the Shadow of Transition documents the complicated pursuit of transitional justice in Yemen after the 2011 uprising against long-time President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Transitional justice, as broadly defined by the New York-based non-profit organization International Center for Transitional Justice, is a victim-centered process that “refers to how societies respond to the legacies of massive and serious human rights violations.” Yadav’s book does not only recount the complicated situation of transitional justice in Yemen but also intelligently suggests some avenues to promote the work of local civil society actors that currently advance the cause of justice.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Click Here.
As the author explains, the grievances that motivated calls for transitional justice after Saleh was forced out of power originate in the two decades that followed the unification of North and South Yemen to form the Republic of Yemen in 1990. After unification, the northern elites, headed by Saleh – who had presided North Yemen since 1978 and became President of the Republic of Yemen in 1990 – imposed themselves over southern politicians. The discontentment of the southern elites led to a short civil war in 1994. Much later, in 2007, former South Yemen army officers who had been dismissed after the 1994 war started to protest against the Saleh government and were soon joined by the youth and other groups. These protest mobilizations were known as the Hirak, “The Movement”, and many of its participants supported a return to independence for southern Yemen. The grievances held by the Hirak, explains Yadav, were intensified by the army’s response to the protests, which “included a dramatic escalation of force that was out of proportion with the provocation.”[2]
Meanwhile, in the northwestern province of Sa’dah, the local population resented the growing influence of Saudi-supported Salafi clerics as well as the economic and political marginalization of the region. The members of the influential al-Houthi family led a new movement against Saleh that combined Zaydi religious revivalism – Zaydism is a branch of Shia Islam that is majoritarian in Yemen’s northern areas – with anti-imperialism. The Houthi movement entered a series of armed confrontations with the Yemeni government from 2004 to 2010, known as the Sa’dah Wars, that resulted in the internal displacement of more than 100,000 Yemenis. As was the case with Saleh’s counter-productive approach towards the Hirak, the Houthi movement grew more powerful as a result of “the government’s campaign of destruction and its perceived partnership with those engaged in a cultural onslaught against Zaydi beliefs and practices.”[3]
The northern populations affected by the Saleh government’s brutal campaigns during the Sa’dah wars on the one hand, and the supporters of the Hirak on the other, were at the forefront of the demands to hold accountable the former regime after Saleh lost power. However, the 2012 Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative (GCCI) that forced Saleh’s resignation in favor of his vice-president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, in its Article 3, called for the immunity of “the President [Saleh] and ‘those who worked with him during his time in office.’” In Yadav’s assessment, “the prospects of pursuing justice though the legal system were remote due to provisions of the GCCI that protected and empowered existing elites, as well as to the weakness and non-independence of the Yemeni judiciary.”[4]
In 2013, President Hadi – himself interested in a narrow approach to transitional justice due to his position as vice-president of Yemen from 1994 to 2012 – created two commissions to investigate illegal land seizures in southern Yemen after unification and the dismissal of southern military officers and civil servants after the 1994 war. The commissions encountered several difficulties: the volume of applications was enormous – the commission dealing with the former southern officials alone received over 150,000 claims –, there was a severe lack of funds for compensation payments, and the increasing spiral of violence in Yemen since 2014 complicated the process even further. The gap between demands and capacity in Yemen was even broader than in other countries facing similar problems at the same time, such as Tunisia after the fall of long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.[5]
As we have seen, the institutional road to transitional justice in Yemen is full of obstacles. As of now, there is actually no national transitional justice program to speak of. Civil society actors, however, have been doing important work to address injustices “through their everyday practices under conflict conditions.”[6] This is something Yadav has been able to ascertain after conducting multiple interviews with civil society actors across Yemen. and participating in collaborative research projects with Yemeni colleagues. Although the author has not been able to visit Yemen since 2011, she has previous experience conducting research on the ground.
Yemenis have managed to establish a range of justice projects that, although highly localized, have yielded tangible results. For instance, the author explains how a civil society organization mediated between a militia operating on the Red Sea coast and the local community so that female students would be allowed to attend school. On a broader level, Yadav argues that knowledge production by Yemeni researchers documenting the current conflict represents a form of preservative justice. Their documentation work “creates a record essential to post-conflict accountability, reconciliation, and reparative policies.”[7]
The civil society actors interviewed by Yadav often resent the fact that international peacebuilding efforts in Yemen – chief among them those sponsored by the United Nations – have failed to promote local ownership of their programs. An additional complication is that small civil society organizations doing highly valuable work in Yemen struggle to receive international financial support, which often goes to those Yemeni groups with more experience in communicating with donors or writing project proposals.[8] Yadav advocates for international institutions to recognize the agency and learn from the successes of local civil actors. She argues that a bottom-up approach is needed so that lessons from local justice work can be incorporated to broader peacebuilding projects.
Although the reader would probably have liked to learn more about the local initiatives promoting justice within Yemen, the projects and people Yadav writes about offer a glimpse into Yemen’s current reality that goes beyond the hunger and destruction we are sadly more accustomed to. The current civil war in Yemen has led to the death of around 250,000 people according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Any path to recovery and reconstruction for the southern Arabian country will necessarily be uncertain and full of difficulties. But one thing is clear: in the future Yemen will necessitate more than ever the dedication of those Yemenis who currently are, in Yadav’s words, “pursuing justice amidst war.”
[1] Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (London: Hurst and Co., 2022), p. 6.
[2] Ibid., p. 99.
[3] Ibid., p. 94.
[4] Ibid., p. 133.
[5] Salehi, Mariam. “Trying Just Enough or Promising Too Much? The Problem-Capacity-Nexus in Tunisia’s Transitional Justice Process.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 16, no. 1 (2022): 98–116.
[6] Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War, p. 156.
[7] Ibid., p. 182
[8] Abdulkarim Qassim, Loay Amin, Mareike Transfeld and Ewa Strzelecka “The Role of Civil Society in Peacebuilding in Yemen,” Brief (Bonn: Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO), May 2020), p. 14. https://carpo-bonn.org/en/18-the-role-of-civil-society-in-peacebuilding-in-yemen/.
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