A Century of Upheaval: The Fall of the Imāmate and the Rise of the Ḥūthīs in Yemen, 1904 - 2014

Abstract

This dissertation addresses two linked yet seemingly unrelated questions. The first is why, after more than a millennium, did the Zaydī imāmate of north Yemen collapse in 1962? The second is how and why did a small Zaydī revivalist group, known popularly as the Ḥūthīs, manage to seize the state in 2015? Both of these questions, which loom over much of twentieth century history in Yemen, center on the changing modalities of what it means to be Zaydī in Yemen and the political implications of those choices. Each question can be asked and answered on its own, but to ask them in tandem allows this work to tell a broader and more important story in two distinct ways.

First, it requires one to take a step back from micro trends that often emerge from studies of shorter time periods in order to better view and understand larger trends. Second it allows for the emergence of this dissertation’s central argument: that the 1962-70 Yemeni Civil War was the pivot point in twentieth century Yemeni history. These two guiding questions help to impose order on what, from the outside, can look confusing. From the rise of the Ḥūthī movement to the group’s more recent alliance with former president ‘Alī ‘Abdullāh Ṣāliḥ, who less than a decade earlier had led six successive wars against the group, contemporary Yemen often appears to be contradictory, volatile, and unpredictable. This dissertation, however, argues that such a surface reading is mistaken. The current conflict in Yemen is, in many ways, a direct result of the unfinished business of the 1962-70 Civil War, which itself was a result of an over-centralization of power by the Ḥamīd al-Dīn imāms in the first half of the twentieth century.