Introduction

The war in Yemen that began in 2015 challenges any analysis that reduces the conflict to a mere clash between two distinct sectarian, tribal, partisan, regional, or even global forces. Such a binary unravels through a constant shifting of multilayered local alliances formed in concert with, sometimes as a response to, foreign interventions. Key to Yemen's transformation from a peaceful revolutionary call for regime change in 2011 into violence is the violation of the country's sovereignty. This is not to suggest the existence of neat binaries between domestic and foreign agendas, but to emphasise, as this chapter will demonstrate, how violation of sovereignty has been integral to Yemen's sociopolitical reality.

The 2011 revolutionary demands were soon compromised by a transitional plan to transfer power in the form of the National Dialogue Conference (2012–14). The outcome of the concerted efforts to secure a peaceful transition was a new constitution and a proposal for a Yemeni federal governance system of six semi-autonomous regions. But the failure to fulfil this outcome was in part predictable since the proposed resolutions were manufactured in response to top-down foreign dictates that imposed what was considered a proper political process for Yemen. This process was developed through a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) initiative that compromised ‘justice for peace’, and which was monitored by what came to be known as the Group of Ten Ambassadors (aka Friends of Yemen), representing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China. Even though women and youth voices were incorporated into the conference, the GCC initiative sustained, if not empowered, ‘traditional rival elites’ who had already dominated Yemen's political scene for three decades. This developed in a context of suspicion from revolutionaries who have wrestled with mounting pressures from state and political parties over who ought to represent them from the early days of the revolution.

It is important to draw a distinction between the idea and the reality of the conference. The conference itself, Sheila Carapico argues, was a ‘Yemeni initiative drawing on indigenous precedents and activism’ for ‘a new, negotiated social contract between regions, parties and stakeholders in a pluralistic and decentralized polity’.