To understand the way in which Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other groups have become involved in the conflict in Yemen, we must understand the complexities of both political life and the conflict itself. The existence of myriad groups with competing agendas reveals the parabolic pressures working broadly within the context of the Yemeni state. Although largely reduced to either a ‘proxy struggle’ between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or a conflict between the Houthi insurgents and the regime of President Hadi, events on the ground are far more complex. While there are aspects of both narratives that ring true, both require contextualization and must be located within the milieu of Yemeni politics.

Part III of the books analyses the legacies of the 2011 “revolutions”. In these legacies, Chapter 5 identifies federalism in Yemen and an abundance of new social roles in Tunisia. Civic activism in Tunisia includes, among others: new spaces, social roles, and pushes for decentralization, with universal municipalization. The traditional prestige of the state is used to downplay the resistance of artistic creativity. In Yemen, because of deteriorating economic conditions, the democratic articulations of representations and violence are made vulnerable. The map of federal Yemen is used as an excuse for the outbreak of a civil war. Democratic pressure remains nonetheless present.

The chapter explores a paradox – the apparent impossibility of decentralization in a country where orography, a long history of political fragmentation, and a vulnerable central state authority would appear naturally to favor decentralized authority. Through a historical exploration of governance in different parts of Yemen since 1960, it reveals longstanding demands for decentralized governance, as well as the existence of a strong society capable of formulating and pressuring the central authority to implement decentralization reforms. It then analyzes efforts from 2013 to 2015 to produce a new constitutional order built on federal principles – first through a broad-based National Dialogue and, then, through a far less inclusive constitutional drafting process. This quite revolutionary project of founding a federal Yemen with six regions was eventually buried under Gulf Cooperation Council coalition bombs from March 2015 onward. The chapter concludes by exploring the circumstances that led to the rejection of a federalist solution and the eruption of civil war in Yemen, but notes that federalism, far from being an imported concept, has generated rich intra-Yemeni intellectual debates. A six-region federal Yemen might not be the way forward, but a “federalism of the provinces” could be a path for future reconstruction of Yemen.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

Chapter 7 presents the third of the three case studies: Killing the Individual Human Being via Drones. Here I look at targeted killings and the growing use of drones in this practice. The chapter offers a detailed discussion of the predominantly legal and ethical debate. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates the relevance of an analysis guided by insights from IR theory. But it also discusses legal questions concerning International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law. The case study engages in detail with the general discourse on drone strikes and targeted killings and provides an in-depth analysis of specific strike types and drone strikes. The analysis demonstrates how the individual human being appears as an innocent civilian who should not be killed (if possible) or as a guilty terrorist who should be killed.

This chapter is concerned with Germany’s stand on State responsibility and liability. Regarding the former, the German position on State responsibility in the context of arms exports to Yemen is explored. Germany’s reading of the Nicaragua judgment is found to be both unnecessary and incorrect. Further, Germany’s differentiation between ‘bearing responsibility’ and ‘being responsible’ is assessed as being well founded in the context of a missile attack carried out on Saudi Arabia. Concerning the dispute with Greece on war reparations stemming from the two World Wars, Germany’s rejection of claims of reparations, grounded in the opinion that twhe issue is settled, is presented and discussed.

Chapter 6 focuses on Libya and Yemen, both cases in which the former ruling dictator was removed – and eventually in both cases killed – but the result was the fragmentation and near-collapse of the state accompanied by direct and competitive foreign military intervention. Although ‘tribalism’ is often presented as a common factor in producing this outcome in both states, the chapter presents a materialist account of the tribe: just as in the case of the sect, tribal identification and forms of mobilisation acquiring their importance from previous forms of political economy. In both Libya and Yemen, the inheritance of previous revolutions from above – Gaddafi’s in Libya, and the anti-monarchical and anti-colonial revolutions of the 1960s in North and South Yemen, respectively – also shaped the revolutionary-counter-revolutionary conflicts after 2011. Although the NATO campaign in Libya in 2011 has been taken as a paradigmatic case of humanitarian intervention, assimilating the uprising to mid-2000s US policies of ‘regime change’, this chapter demonstrates that in both Libya and Yemen counter-revolutionary external intervention has been much more substantial and consequential.

Using the concept of a revolutionary situation as a turning point in which previously accepted social structures and relations are in flux, this chapter demonstrates the profoundly revolutionary nature of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Tracing the history of the revolutionary situations in each case – Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen – the chapter demonstrates how mass uprisings of historically remarkable size and breadth established new forms and sites of sovereignty and challenged existing social relations. These included mass, class-based revolts rooted in dissatisfaction with decades of neoliberal economic policy in the region, and the rejection of hierarchies of gender and sect. These revolutionary situations often produced a new sense of expanded and collective selfhood, which would then require counter-revolutionary violence to be eradicated. This chapter, thus, outlines the revolutionary situations that post-2011 counter-revolutionaries sought to end.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

Chapter 2 provides a brief historical background of Middle Eastern migration to the west and details how authoritarian-nationalist regimes in Libya, Syria, and Yemen pushed exiles and emigrants to the United States and Great Britain. By examining the state of diaspora mobilization from the 1960s to the eve of the Arab Spring in 2010, the author demonstrates anti-regime movements were small, atomized, and considered partisan by their conationals. Neither Libyan and Syrian exiles nor well-resourced white-collar professionals were able to forge public member-based associations or initiate large anti-regime protest events during this period. Yemeni movements, meanwhile, focused on supporting southern separation from the Yemeni state, rather than on the reform or liberalization of the Yemeni government.

When and how do constitution-making processes hinder democratic transitions? Examining the Arab Spring constitutional reforms, this chapter identifies four pathways through which non-inclusive and/or nonparticipatory processes lead to either constitutional failure or democratic backsliding. The first type of process leading to failure is the “populist” process, a nondemocratic, exclusionary process identified by a majority rule (Egypt 2012). The second type is the “window-dressing” process where severely contested regimes unwilling to democratize initiate constitutional reforms which only appear inclusive or participatory by allowing a small group of moderate opposition groups to participate (e.g., Jordan 2011, Morocco 2011, Egypt 2014, and Algeria 2016). The third failed pathway is through “closed” constitution-making processes where input from the general public is not sought, nor are major interest groups and civil society organizations offered a seat at the table (Bahrain 2012, Syria 2012, Oman 2011, Saudi Arabia 2013, and Egypt 2019). The last failed pathway of constitution-making processes is “conflict” constitutions, which involves a non-inclusive process in ethnically or regionally divided nations. As the cases of Yemen (2015) and Libya (2017) show, in such circumstances the process of crafting the constitution only exacerbates the extant conflicts.

The authoritative texts of the Shāfiʿī school such as the Minhāj began to be circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim, where its largest followers had started to take up residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj. This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century with a focus on one commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in Mecca. The trajectories of this commentary reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased mobility toward Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The Tuḥfa addressed its immediate regional contexts, while reasserting the geo-cultural superiority of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs. Its approach was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries. Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqas, now commentators on his Minhāj were divided into two sub-schools.

In the legal textual tradition of the Minhāj and the Tuḥfa, a particular subsequent text and its author mark a point from which to analyse Shāfiʿī experiments in the Indian Ocean rim. This chapter considers Fatḥ al-muʿīn, written by Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn bin Muḥammad Ghazālī al-Malaybārī (d. ca. 1583), an autocommentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn. Both the base text and the autocommentary form an independent family in the Shāfiʿī textual history with their own textual descendants, while they can also be considered as indirect progenies of the Tuḥfa, for they stimulated the Shāfiʿī legacy of Ibn Ḥajar and his oeuvre on the Malabar Coast and the wider territories around the Indian Ocean. They demonstrate how Indian Ocean Muslims made their way into the textual landscape of Shāfiʿīsm, and even into the heartlands of Islam. They added to the long pattern of Islamic thought in a traditional way and also advanced it. The chapter investigates how it criticised many methods and arguments of its intellectual predecessors and generated a different discourse within the school from its peculiar perspective from Malabar and the Indian Ocean at large.

The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen is a valuable case study in the coercive use of air power. Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign demonstrates the danger of employing a punishment approach against a subnational actor in a multi-sided internal conflict. Strategies of collective punishment, blockade, and decapitation have all malfunctioned against a stubborn and resilient Houthi adversary. The early audit from Yemen endorses a denial strategy, supports the growing orthodoxy that air attack is most effectively applied in support of ground forces, and offers insight on the relative utility of interdiction and close air support for that purpose. The Saudi-led coalition’s performance also underscores how difficult it is to achieve positive objectives with proxy warfare, regardless of air support. This chapter dissects the campaign, assesses its effectiveness, and draws lessons about air power’s ability to influence the outcome of similar complex civil war scenarios elsewhere.