I hope my colleagues find this work worthy, for it is the product of many years' research, and a great many people provided information and insights. My interest in Yemen began with my first visit to Sana'a, Hodeida, Taiz, and Aden in 1972, as part of a larger tour of the region made possible by my undergraduate year at the American University in Cairo in 1971–72; it has continued ever since.

Research on which this book was based has been supported, directly or indirectly, from a range of sources. I returned to Sana'a in January 1977, with a grant for PhD dissertation research from the State University of New York at Binghamton. During the next four years of continuous residence in North Yemen, I worked as a “freelance” social scientist, conducting baseline surveys for several international development agencies and contractors, including the US Agency for International Development and the World Bank. These included an urban planning survey of workplaces in the five cities of the YAR; a short study of women's economic activities in three rural locations; “rural economic recognizance” in Hajja and Hodeida governorates; a comparative study of agricultural production in Ibb and ‘Amrān, conducted in conjunction with the American Institute for Yemeni Studies; and a nationwide survey conducted in twenty-two communities for the national rural electrification project. Between expeditions for these studies, I worked from my home in Sana'a with what was then called the Confederation of Yemeni Development Associations, preparing a dissertation on the “cooperative movement.”

While it is tempting to conceptualize states as fixed entities possessing hegemonic control over the civic sphere, in twentieth-century Yemen “the state” has been a variable rather than a constant. Three generations of states have ruled parts of Yemen during the past century: a motley mixture of semi-feudal and colonial systems through the 1960s; two republics associated with opposite sides of the cold war during the 1970s and 1980s; and, since May 22 1990, the Republic of Yemen. The civil war of 1994 culminated a hundred years of struggle over the composition and power of the state, and the current government recognizes quite well the limits of is own constitutional, judicial, institutional, and fiscal capacities. Although it commands international diplomatic recognition, membership in the United Nations and other international institutions, military and police forces, a national budget, a civil service, substantial foreign debt, weighty physical infrastructure, and other attributes of state-ness, and although a common national conscious helps bind more than fifteen million Yemenis together, the Republic of Yemen is a new state, still in the process of formation. The gradual, uneven development of the contemporary Yemeni nation-state, sketched in table 2.1, is the timeline against which the variable, dynamic relationship between states and civil society must be viewed.

Civilian state construction is in part a quest for constitutional order and legal hegemony, an effort to centralize judicial practices, co-opt interpretations, and impose the “rule of law.” A diverse, semi-sequential mixture of legal traditions – Ottoman, Zaydī, Shafa'i, British civil and martial, Socialist, Egyptian, various tribal principles, internationally recommended commercial codes – complicates this quest.

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.

Yemen's second political opening differed from either the first or the third., for the action shifted from national to community politics. The context for this opening was the tenuous rule of an unstable North Yemeni republican state over a society undergoing a profound socioeconomic transformation fueled by infusions of foreign capital in the form of remittances and foreign aid. Under these circumstances, and with ample resort to folk mechanisms, ad hoc road, school, and utilities projects transformed everyday material life, enhanced the power of the state, and delivered the global market to rural North Yemen. The structural-functional NGO model, as foreign development experts learned, fitted badly, but the impressive project record showed that formal modern organization was not a prerequisite for getting important things done. Furthermore, while legislation and financial allocations certainly influenced the organization of civil society, LDAs not only negotiated with the center from a position of strength but collectively affected the structure of the government as well. The case study of self-help also shows the importance of basic services as the material basis for state hegemony, underscoring how the imposition of legal–rational accounting methods is part of that process. As far as I know, nothing like it has been documented elsewhere in the Arab world.

The various perspectives on Arab civil society identified in the introductory chapter each shed some insight into the phenomenon known in English as LDAs and in Arabic as ta'āwun al-ahlī. In comparative cross-national perspective the Yemeni LDAs seemed a remarkable instance of local self-help, although the popular dimension of cooperation also infused its practice with folk idioms cultural essentialists often dismissed as inherently reactionary.

In late colonial Aden economic prosperity coincided with governmental efforts to offset dissent by tolerating some forms of association and expression. Although, as noted, political and economic liberalism were half-hearted and restricted, public spaces were expansive: shops, cafes, businesses, parks, schools, libraries, radio, and publications together formed a sort of free market-place of ideas. In this environment, organizational activity flourished. Aden's relative openness, especially in contrast to Sana'a or Taiz, gave rise to a plethora of projects in the nongovernmental public sphere: sports, cultural, and charitable clubs; offices of village associations and their umbrella Yemeni Federation; local, South Yemeni, pan-Yemeni, and pan-Arab political groups; labor unions and the Aden Trades Union Congress; and Adeni as well as pan-Yemeni presses. These projects rather resemble bubbles on the surface of boiling water, appearing and submerging, but they were indeed pluralist, projected public opinion, articulated interests, and offered some state-like social services.

There is a temptation for Westerners to arrange these activities on a Traditional–modern or primordial–civic continuum. Associations with religious, tribal, village, or neighborhood names, or called rābita something or something ahlī, might be dubbed primordial, while urban, intellectual or nationalist initiatives seem more modern. On closer examination, however, the dichotomous distinction between traditional and civic is shown to be a facile heuristic rather than an empirical descriptor.

Yemeni scholars offer other continua that might, but should not, be confused with primordial–civic: local–national, right–left, and rural–urban. Some groups favored narrow localism based on identification with the protectorate statelets or Adeni separatism, others looked to a wider regionalism, on the lines of greater Hadramī, Yāfiī, or Lahjī unity. South Arabian or South Yemeni nationalism translated into support for a federation.

Heralded for a “third wave of democratization,” the 1990s witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, official apartheid, and a host of dictatorships buttressed by the bipolar structures of the cold war. Even in the Arab world, so often seen as uniquely inhospitable to political, economic, and cultural liberalism, noteworthy political openings raised hopes for more tolerant, responsive, rule-based, fair, pluralist governance and greater personal liberty, freedom, and participation in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, and Yemen. Among these, the prospects for the newly unified Republic of Yemen – itself partly a product of the end of the cold war – seemed especially dramatic and promising. Alas, however, in Yemen as in several other Arab countries, a brief “democratic experiment” was soon submerged in a counter-current of violence and repression. Is nothing better possible for Arab countries?

Those who contend that nothing better is possible have observed that even high standards of living, bourgeois lifestyles, and Western technology have not produced a relaxation of political controls in the Arab Gulf states. Furthermore, electoral competition in the Arab world seems only to embolden intolerant religious puritans who neither respect basic rights nor tolerate alternative ideologies. According to this argument Islamic civilization in general, and Arab tribal culture in particular, have not and probably will not fertilize the sorts of vibrant civic activism that underlie Western democracies, for deeply imbued cultural values and social structures retard the development of civil society.

Although this argument has been widely critiqued, we have few empirical studies that offer evidence to the contrary.

The trajectories of state and market operate on a historically derived socio-cultural base, or anterior social formation, that we normally refer to as “traditional” or “primordial” society. The purpose of this chapter is to explore this customary, or ahlī, character of society in its political and economic dimensions. The focus is not on historical developments per se but on change. As the ethnographic literature shows, traditions are variable and contested. The anterior social formation, where politics and economics are embedded in a Gemeinschaft, reacted to political and economic transformations by adapting customary mechanisms to bridge the gap between the primordial civic realm and modern Yemeni civil society. By and large, this was a struggle over creation and control of public social capital.

The argument here is that there was a discernible “primordial civic realm” wherein religious and tribal mechanisms provided for public welfare and protected public spaces. These mechanisms are of two sorts, tribal–communal and religious–philanthropic. To understand these mechanisms it is necessary to look at both their ideological and their material content. The ideologies of tribalism and Islam depict moral economies assigning rights and responsibilities to individuals according to their status, and they contain ideas about equality, election, consultation, even rights of dissent. Nonetheless, the material basis of the public welfare mechanisms is based at least in part on deprivation and exploitation. Not surprisingly, people did not cling all that tenaciously to conditions of scarcity and appropriation. Rather, once material conditions changed, they transformed indigenous welfare mechanisms and the morality on which they were supposedly based.

Thus unification brought with it a process of contingent legal liberalization that lifted restrictions on civic participation. Concomitant with these salutary processes, however, a political crisis was brewing that would culminate in the 1994 civil war. The supposedly co-equal parties to the unity coalition gradually but steadily retreated from the spirit and letter of the unity accords, the constitution, and democratizing legislation. Thus like earlier liberal experiments the civic opening rather quickly reached the limits of government tolerance, whereupon the space open to public activism contracted. Nonetheless, groups that emerged after unity sought by various means to forestall bloodshed and preserve constitutional liberties. The deeper the crisis within the state, the wider the civic pressure for reconciliation. Recalling earlier constitutional proposals emanating from non-ruling elites in times of acute state crisis, an independent committee backed by public rallies proposed a political compromise incorporating popular demands for personal liberty, freedom of information, local self-governance, limits on executive power, and less corruption. Although it failed to stop the war, the national dialogue – both within the committee and beyond – was a significant moment for civic involvement.

The rout of the more progressive of the ruling parties spelled a victory for conservative forces including the Islamist right, the political security organization, and a contorted private sector dominated by Sana'ani officer-shaykhs. In international and comparative terms, Yemen was one of many countries where formerly ruling socialist parties fell into defeat, disrepute, and despair in the 1990s. Nor was Yemen the first country where a combination of inflation, unemployment, and services deterioration have bolstered right-wing ideologies and social malaise.

The two-part hypothesis with which this study began was that civic spaces are defined by political, economic, and cultural factors, and in turn civic activism has discernible (though certainly not determinant) effects on states, material conditions, and popular culture. A particular effort has been made to demonstrate the dynamic, contested, even contradictory elements of this process. The task of this conclusion is to summarize the generalizations that can and cannot be drawn from this study of Yemen about Arab culture, political economy, and civic potential.

Yemen is so far off the beaten path that even Arab or Western Middle East specialists often neglect to visit. To the extent that a conventional wisdom exists about Yemen, however, it is that a combination of Islam and tribalism explains everything. Journalists infer from outward appearances (men wearing skirts and daggers, women in all-encompassing black, aesthetic preferences for indigenous architecture, and the folksy exoticism of the scenery) that something along the lines of the “Islamic conservatism of the traditional tribes of the north” accounts for political outcomes. Conveniently unencumbered by facts about recent history, this shallow cultural determinism does not hold up to close scrutiny. Islamic and tribal law have been used as the antonym for ideal-typical Western modernism by writers from Weber to Huntington, but in an era of post-modern scholarship no serious analysis can result from laying a traditional–modern/primordial–civic heuristic foil sidewise across geography, as though some places are frozen in time while others have history.

Culture is certainly important to understanding the civic life of any polity. In Yemen culture plays a salient role in the sorts of social, intellectual, political, and voluntary activities covered in this study.

For some years after the closure of the Moghan frontier, no major political disturbances brought the Shahsevan tribes to the attention of the central government, or to that of the representatives of the two imperial powers who had earlier been interested in their situation.