Observers interested in Yemen often worry about the near collapse of the Yemeni state. Such worries assume that the death of the state will lead to a complete social disintegration. With a brief reflection on the 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative, the recent US–Saudi-led intervention, this article argues that thinking about the Yemeni state through public worry is an exercise in symbolic violence. This violence articulates itself through the erasure of Yemenis’ communitarian culture; an erasure that becomes the condition for perpetuating the life of the discursively produced ‘weak’ state, and the domination of regional-international powers. This article proposes an alternative approach towards rethinking the ‘weak’ Yemeni state. It suggests that rethinking the Yemeni state through mourning its death could possibly give birth to a novel form of political community. It is through acts of mourning the injury and (imagined) death of the weak Yemeni state that the promise of the state as a unifying apparatus is reclaimed.
This article demonstrates how protests as modes of political action are not only about claiming public spaces and democratic rights. Essentially, they articulate a mode of claiming corporeal democratic bodies cultivated and inhabited by revolutionaries in their attempts to unsettle the established political order. To elucidate this argument, this article reflects on the Life March, a 267-kilometer march from Ta'izz to San'a on foot over five days, staged by Yemeni protesters in 2011. It pays attention to the ways in which the bodily actions of the marchers incited a social imagination of the democratic communitarian order. The marchers' injured feet mobilized desires to reciprocate through collective ethical practices of waiting, greeting, giving, and protecting enacted by communities en route to San'a. The article suggests that through these enactments, communities sought to ethically elevate themselves as political equals to the marchers, allowing a novel form of democratic ethos to emerge. The article contends that an equality among differences rather than sameness was fashioned as the political of a different order came into being.
Yemen’s perpetual security crisis and excess violence have long been blamed on a weak or failed state. Who needs this narrative, and to what end? This article explains how outside powers and local elites for decades have contrived to keep the Yemeni state feeble or absent. These “ghostly politics” have provided impunity for repression and fomented power struggles, culminating in the war that has ravaged the country for seven years. Now an internationally backed peace plan envisions fragmenting the state even further.
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