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Helen Lackner (ed.): Why Yemen Matters: A Society in Transition . (SOAS Middle East Studies.) xviii, 334 pp. London : Saqi Books, in association with the British Yemeni Society and London Middle East Institute, SOAS , 2014. £21.99. ISBN 978 0 86356 777 3 .
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
For those who are not aware of how much Yemen matters in the current maelstrom of Middle East politics, this book makes a convincing case. As the subtitle notes, Yemen is a society in transition following the forced resignation in 2011 of strong man (Ali Abdullah Salih after 33 years in power. The chief value of the volume is that it highlights the context in which Yemen entered the recent turmoil within and without the country; the main drawback is that the current process of rebuilding the state is ongoing and unpredictable. Yemen matters for a variety of reasons, including its strategic location in the volatile Horn of Africa, its recent history following unification of a socialist south and a republican north in 1990, the continuing relevance of tribalism as the main civil society in much of the country, the perceived role of terrorism, the relative ineffectiveness of four decades of development aid, the poverty and dismal health indicators, and the mere fact that Yemen is seldom mentioned in the media except in relation to terrorism.
As is common with most collected papers from a conference, the volume lacks consistency in the sixteen...