Secularism, Security and the Weak State: De-democratizing the 2011 Yemeni Uprising

Abstract

The 2011 Yemeni Uprising, generally subsumed under the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, was popularly portrayed as being “secular” but subsequently hijacked by “religious” forces. Such ubiquitous assumptions take for granted that democracy is essentially secular. This essay examines the secularizing effects embedded in the language and epistemology of security concerns invoked by international and regional powers vis-à-vis Yemen, allowing powerful states to intervene in matters of politics and religion. They generate and are generated by a culture of apprehension, which is cultivated and circulated within a discursive social space of security practices. This culture, I contend, has produced Yemen as a “security crisis” over the longue durée, and was articulated through discourses of republic protection and weak state security since the Cold War, and given new life by the “Global War on Terror”. It is these secular security discourses and the culture of apprehension they generate, rallied by the international and regional powers such as the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which discursively produced and maintained a “weak” Yemeni state, thereby justifying the de-democratizing interventions in the Yemeni polity. I conclude by arguing that attending to the effect of such discourses may explain the world’s largest humanitarian crisis Yemen has become.

Keywords:

• De-democratization
• secularism
• security discourse
• weak state
• Yemen uprising

Notes

1 The JMPs are several opposition parties, formed in 2005, demanding political and economic reform. The JMPs are led by the Islamist party, Iṣlāḥ.

2 This essay does not cover in detail the way many Yemenis inside and outside protest squares were implicated in this discursive apprehensive structure and how they acted upon themselves to de-democratize their own sensibilities.

3 For more on how this unfolded nationally, see Al-Eriani (2019).

4 Yemenis have long engaged and deliberated in matters of state politics and democracy. In doing so, they historically accommodated different traditions into the political processes. However, once these agents become part of spaces constituted by the state (or international norms), their subjective position ends up conforming to the structuring objectives of that space.

5 It was only in 1990 that the united Yemen Republic was born by the unification of North and South Yemens. A brief civil war in 1994 between the northern and southern elites concluded with the victory of the North.

6 Traditional republicans composed of Islamists and tribes. To capture the complex historical relationship between tribes, Islam, communism and politics in Yemen, see Dresch and Haykel (1995).

7 These were largely nationalist republicans who had been excluded or self-exiled after the 1969 crackdown.

8 In most cases, these crises were informed by questions of religion and politics that he adopted from international and regional anxieties (six wars against “shi’it” Houthī, Islamic terrorism).

9 For details on the discursive subordination of the Yemen economy, see Blumi (2018).

10 At that time, and after the Civil War that erupted between the northern and southern elites in 1994, the southern socialist regime was marginalized and northern elites led by Ṣāleḥ dominated state power.

11 However, he represented an important source of legitimacy, due to his unique ability to mobilize “the street” (Yadav 2013, 20–33).

12 The Iṣlāḥ party has a very complex structure and all of its members cannot be included in the West’s category of “moderate Islam”. For a proper understanding of the complexity of the party and its transformation, see Yadav (2013).

13 Iṣlāḥ was ambivalent about the uprising at the beginning as it was committed to working from within state institutions and through ongoing negotiations with the regime, demanding democratic reform (Bonnefoy and Poirier 2012; Yadav 2013).

14 According to them, the main critique was that the GCCI gave immunity to Ṣāleḥ and his family.

15 For insights on the matter, see “Is Saudi Arabia’s Assault on Yemen Just About Curtailing Iranian Influence?’ http://www.lobelog.com/is-saudi-arabias-assault-on-yemen-just-about-curtailing-irans-influence.