Yemen's earlier civic openings, so different from one another in many respects, nonetheless followed a common fourfold outline. Each began with contingent liberalization by a fledgling administration seeking to mobilize popular and investor participation in its governance project. Along with investment incentives, governments scheduled elections and allowed some autonomous organizing. In a second, simultaneous, process, civic activity transcended its rather narrow legal boundaries to challenge the regime: not by attempting to seize power but by demonstrating economic prowess, offering alternative constitutional visions, or conveying various social and economic interests. After failing to secure the hoped-for popular mandate, power-holders began amending the rules to increase control of elections, economic activity, and autonomous organizations. Amidst mounting elite and popular criticism, regimes then imposed higher penalties for transgressions, deployed troops to enforce compliance, and finally suspended the rules, resorting to arbitrary detentions, crude censorship, curfews, expulsions, and torture. Escalating violence and repression culminated in civil war and, eventually, an authoritarian triumph that crushed civic initiatives as well as armed resistance. In each case a new government issued edicts centralizing all significant political, civic, intellectual, and economic projects. Critics and alternative elites were banished.

Modern Yemeni governments have only intermittently subordinated civil society to a military or party apparatus, however. The authoritarian denouement to each of the earlier openings, one in the South and the other in the North, left both systems in crisis. Political and economic malaise provided the impetus for unity and, with unity, for liberalization. Aden and Sana'a each imagined a potential social base among the other's citizens, a groundswell of support among the other's dissidents, and a cozy relationship with Yemeni millionaires in the Gulf.