Across the Middle East, tribes and states have entered into different relationships. Whereas in many countries tribes were confronted with massive attempts at interference by their states, after the 1962 revolution and the ensuing civil war, the northern Yemeni Republic for many years remained a comparatively weak state with little coercive means at its disposal. Its rule was rather based on indirect means: the politics of co-optation and patronage, the politicization of development efforts, and the encouragement and exploitation of tribal conflict for its own benefit. This lecture aims to exemplify tribe-state relation in republican Yemen by reviewing the recent history of the Khawlan al-Tiyal tribe. In the 1960s, parts of Khawlan took advantage of the power vacuum resulting from the civil war and seized the opportunity to form a kind of competitive polity beyond the state’s control. In 1972, with the so-called Bayhan massacre, a part of Khawlan’s tribal leadership fell victim to machinations within the republic’s new political and tribal establishment, and within a regional context with its competing sources of North Yemeni, Saudi and South Yemeni state power. In the mid-1970s, Khawlan ultimately entered into a relation with the state in which the Bayhan massacre took on a political life of its own as the state sought to manipulate and exploit the tribe’s grievances for political purposes. The exploration of the local minutiae of the Khawlan case exemplifies the darkest and brightest sides of tribe-state relation in Yemen, and, by doing so, the continuing importance of tribalism in post-revolutionary Yemen.

Domestic photography and memories of loss in northern Yemen This article intends to deal with domestic photography and the memory of loss in northern Yemen. It considers what memories are triggered either by photos of loved ones who have disappeared during the 1960s civil war or by (re-)imagined albums which were stolen or destroyed. Photographs in the domestic realm are potent symbols of the present absence of those who were killed during the revolution or the ensuing civil war. The onlooker’s gaze enables emotions to be interpreted and experienced in retrospect, an aspect which seems especially relevant to intergenerational memory. The article intends to look at the dialectic of presence and absence in the imagination of dead persons and the circumstances of their death. How do second-generation Yemenis interpret and negotiate the knowledge that has been transmitted to them via those who suffered violent bereavement and have only their photographs left? In as far as photographs have “communicative power” (E. Edwards), they often inspire the telling of (hi)stories, thus allowing analysis of how people engage with and experience history.

The historiography of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) has generally insisted that it was only in the 1970s and 80s that state structures took shape, since the revolution and civil war had made it impossible to create new government institutions during the 1960s. At the same time, much of the writing on the civil war itself, particularly in Arabic, has celebrated the ‘September Revolution’ as the birth of a new state, including a dozen new ministries, a larger central military and rising government income and expenditure. At first glance, these appear to be irreconcilable tendencies: did the central government gain in power and influence? Or was it paralysed, succumbing to fragmentation because of the war itself? The civil war, Saudi-Arabian support for the royalists and the extensive Egyptian presence in Yemen caused complex structural and institutional changes. Beginning from the idea that the history of the development of the state is in important measure the history of its income and expenditure—and the associated bargaining, conflict, institutions and practices—the paper traces the profound fiscal transformations wrought by the civil war. These have remained almost wholly neglected by scholarship to date. The paper reveals how external aid and the pressures of civil war prompted the YAR government to give up taxation. Tax receipts, even from thoroughly republican areas, plummeted. This prompted a broader retreat of public administration from towns and villages: the central government lost the ability to choose local judges and officials, even governors, in sharp contrast to accepted practice during the final years of the Imamate. Foreign loans, development aid, and import duties took the place of direct taxation. These external sources of funding allowed successive YAR governments to increase expenditure, grow the military and civil service, and increase salaries, even as tax receipts flatlined. Government institutions grew at the centre as they disappeared in the peripheries and government allocation reconstituted a minimum of central control through patronage. In this way, the examination sheds new light on the way in which the political economy of the YAR was profoundly altered by the civil war and on how and why the particular alliances between military and tribal actors took shape that came to define what Paul Dresch called the YAR’s ‘military-tribal-commercial complex.’ Moreover, the discussion raises interesting questions about, and challenges to broader literatures on rentierism, state-formation, and centre-periphery relations associated with the (post)-colonial gatekeeper state.

The civil war in Yemen between the Republicans, supported by Egypt’s Nasserite forces, and the Royalists, funded by Saudi Arabia, reached a bloody dead end. The Union of Popular Forces (UPF) party held a massive rally in Tahrir Square in Sana’a in November 1963 calling for a peaceful conclusion to the stalemated war. That period witnessed the naissance of The Third Force - under UPF auspices – with its slogan: "The dark past does not return, the bloody present does not remain, and the future is decided by the people.” There were several factors that created a complex murky climate in which the "Republic" was born, hence the difficulty faced by UPF in its attempt to achieve peace. The cloudy political vision was the dominant climate at that time and it was haunted by military coup d’états. The Nasserite glamor had an effect of moving away from civil constitutions and embracing military solutions with the rule of force and subjugation. As the "Nasserite" intervention was connected with the birth of the “Republic” a military system was established that soon enough was infused with tribalism hence the political climate became darker. Modern concepts of "socialism,” "Baathism," and "nationalism" - brought into the country and applied to a different situation - were not able to crystallize their principles for several reasons and were left in the dark. Further, the conflict between the city and the rural areas, the civil and the tribal, the tense relations between the tribes and the army, and the political contradictions between the Shafi'i and Zaydi doctrines about the necessity of revolution against oppressive rulers and the non-obligation of obedience had all been factors in deepening these complexities. External interference stoked further the situation pushing it toward bloodshed. Had not been for the peace efforts of the UPF and The Third Force - that bloody path would have continued. The Third Force managed to convene "republican" and “royalist” leaders at the "Taif Conference" in 1964 that called for peace and for holding an “independent national conference." However, the two other external forces, to maintain their influence, were quick to conclude a reconciliation agreement in 1970 to preempt an independent Yemeni national conference leading to instability that continued to the present day.