Should we discard anthropological research because fieldwork is no longer possible? In this paper I want to present and discuss the various ways in which I continue to conduct anthropological research about Yemen. Reflecting on these different methods I discern a gradual shift, which I attribute to the responsibility I feel as a scholar to engage with my field, even when it has become inaccessible. I make a plea for an engaged scholarship, in which we use our expertise and knowledge to fight injustice, bring about change and work towards peace. I argue that anthropologists have the responsibility to use their understanding to contextualize political analyses, human rights reports, newspaper articles and the like in order to show that the everyday experiences, hardships and struggles of ordinary Yemenis matter within the larger framework of geopolitical interests, regional, national and local conflicts, and military strategies (see Robben 2010: 5). In my own research I distinguish five “strategies” for continuing to do research about Yemen, namely: 1) a geographical shift to Ethiopia, which still relates to my prior work on gender and mobility in Yemen, 2) a historical shift toward studying the relations between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, 3) writing about friends in Yemen, and the impact of the war on their daily lives, 4) taking up engaged scholarship, in which I use my knowledge about Yemen to raise awareness and influence public debates in the Netherlands, 5) collecting data at a distance in collaboration with Yemeni women. I will briefly describe these five strategies and in particular focus on the last one, a recent research project about gender, resilience and peacebuilding. In this project we use story-telling as a method to support Yemeni women, protect them and their families from violence, promote their participation in peace negotiations, and document and bring to justice gender based violence. Projects like this are examples of engaged scholarship in which anthropologists can put their knowledge and expertise at use in order to lessen violence and suffering and encourage social and political change.

No longer able to conduct research or even to visit friends in Yemen, I have now shifted my fieldwork to a proximal country, Djibouti, where I am focusing on the Yemeni refugees who have settled in the Markazi camp since the start of the war. On the one hand, there is nothing methodologically new to this geographical relocation. Yemenis have migrated for centuries and, for decades, anthropologists have conducted research on and with Yemeni diasporas worldwide. Moreover, I had been interested in this Red Sea migration even before the war; my earliest research in Yemen focused initially on its Somali refugee community. What is new—and what drew my attention to this community, aside from the hazards of returning to Yemen—is that now Yemen has produced a refugee population, too. This novelty is articulated by the refugees’ demands that they be regarded and treated as refugees, not as Yemeni migrants or as a population temporarily displaced. It is also embodied by the refugees from Sanaa and Aden who currently live side-to-side, fighting less over the forces behind their departure than over their positions regarding return. Fieldwork in a Yemeni refugee camp—a camp that the Djibouti government now calls a “village”; a Yemeni “village” within earshot of the bombs dropping on their coastal villages across the sea—becomes a way to learn about Yemenis learning about their country. If I am trying to understand the contours of the war through WhatsApp messages, it is because this is how the Markazi residents are keeping up with events in Yemen, too. Of course, my anthropological “displacement” is only temporary—every time I leave Djibouti, my departure underscores that they must stay. For this reason, and to make their situation more visible to the general public, I have turned recently to the use of photographs as an ethnographic and political tool. In this paper, I discuss a collaborative project to give cameras to Yemeni refugees in Markazi as a way for them to both contribute to an ethnography of camp life and to circulate their images and stories within the countries that will not accept them. This paper evaluates this project’s successes and failures in terms of anthropological data collection, the use of interdisciplinary methodologies, and scholarly engagement with communities both displaced and constituted by war.

During the Obama administration, Yemen became the major scene of the American drone campaign. According to American foreign policy decision makers, al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had become the most dangerous wing of global terrorism and thus the Yemen campaign was accelerated. All along its existence on Yemeni soil the Jihadist organization has found its bases in the southern part of the country thus creating the myth in world media that these are areas where the Jihadist group embraces if not popular support at least tolerance. Whatever news came from that part of the country always mentioned al-Qaida as the underlying reason why no political reforms could be facilitated without the consent of Sanaa. For southern Yemenis the reality has been quite different. That the united Saudi Arabian and Yemeni al-Qaida sought refuge in their territories made many to believe that the terrorist group in actual fact was operated by the late Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Salih. The president’s warnings in the height of the 2011 popular uprising that should he be dismissed al-Qaida will take over seemed like a prophesy that came true once the group and its allies invaded several southern towns in the summer of 2011. During the current Yemen war AQAP has nominally fought the Houthis alongside Saudi Arabia, but in actual fact many of its targets have included southern security and police force. Since the start of the war, the Jihadists have been able to invade southern towns and thus the entire south became securitized, a no-go zone for independent observers to monitor what actually happens in the territories where the war largely has been over since long. Without being able to visit the country where I have longstanding ethnographic fieldwork experiences my studies have recently focused on analysing the political developments in the south with media and social media sources, often facing the dilemmas of whose analysis in the news feed is correct and where lies the responsibility of an academic scholar. The important developments to monitor include a popular revolution demanding the reinstatement of independence that during the recent year has restructured into a national government, and the presence of the United Arab Emirates in operations that should raise world attention.