Antecedents of the Revolution: Intersectoral Networks and Post-Partisanship in Yemen

By Stacey Philbrick Yadav

Volume 11, Issue 3, pages 550-563

Introduction

The 2011 protest movement in Yemen has been remarkable for its scope, duration, and sustained non-violence in the face of considerable regime suppression. Understanding this movement, however, requires a careful analysis of its antecedents and the decade-long struggle to form and articulate a post-partisan opposition identity capable of motivating Yemenis to cross the many boundaries of their deeply stratified country. Most of what scholars have come to know about political change in Yemen, as elsewhere, has come through analyses of bottom-up processes and practices, though the mapping of networks and discourses more than descriptions of formal institutions and the rules that putatively govern their functions (Halliday 2006). If social theory suggests that meaning is made in practice, then the articulation of any category of belonging–or, more generally, the politics of identity–must rely on analysis of the everyday interactions between people as they make sense of themselves and their social world (Norton 2004).

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