In early 2018, a panel of experts on Yemeni affairs tabled a 329-page report at the UN Security Council. The report announced that “after three years of conflict, Yemen, as a State, has all but ceased to exist.” “The authority of the legitimate Government of Yemen has now eroded to the point,” the report continued, “that it is doubtful whether it will ever be able to reunite Yemen as a single country.”
The existing “threats to peace, security, and stability of Yemen” listed in the report clearly allude to a state of statelessness. The fragile authority of the legitimate government stands challenged not only in the north but also in the south, where the Southern Transitional Council (STC) has recently been formed. The STC seeks an independent south Yemen. And of course, the Houthis in the north “have now taken unilateral control of all State institutions within their territory.” The report went on to mention the proxy groups backed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and terrorist outfits such as al-Qa‘ida and the Islamic State in the Levant.
Currently, Yemen seems to be in a state of disarray, where there are multiple enemies fighting against a displaced government as well as one another, making the revival of the Yemeni state almost impossible. This might not be a surprise. For Yemen’s body politic has been weak for too long, and now its death has been finally pronounced. The erosion of the Yemeni state and its authority is exemplified by the proliferation of different forces, which in turn have been inflicting death, pain, and suffering on innocent Yemenis. But is it the disappearance of the state that has resulted in the suffering of Yemenis? Put differently, has the Yemeni state ceased to exist in the first place?
The purpose of this essay is three-fold. It offers a Schmittian reading of the prevalent state of violence in the name of retaining the waning state. It briefly traces the history that engendered the language adopted by both Huthies (known as the Partisans of God, originally a Zaydi revivalist movement and now known as an armed militia that has control over the northern part of Yemen) and aHadi (the current President of Yemen) in their description of the Yemeni state. Here, I particularly refer to the language of the weak or fragile state. Finally, I trace the emergence of the weak state discourse in international politics after the fall of the European empire to explore how a special form of the political has come to haunt the discourse of the weak/failed states.
My overarching goal is to tease out some ideas about whether Yemen as a weak state has become a space of double exception; the modern Nomos zone of exception as well as its own exception. Against the conventional wisdom about the withering away of the Yemeni state, I suggest that it is theoretically productive to approach the Yemeni state as a state, which is haunted by a spectre of sovereign colonial past that continues to rely on “stateless” spaces outside its frontier to maintain its own peace and order.
The purpose of this essay is three-fold. It offers a Schmittian reading of the prevalent state of violence in the name of retaining the waning state. It briefly traces the history that engendered the language adopted by both Houthis (known as the Partisans of God, originally a Zaydi revivalist movement and now known as an armed militia that has control over the northern part of Yemen) and Hadi (the current President of Yemen) in their description of the Yemeni state. Here, I particularly refer to the language of the weak or fragile state. Finally, I trace the emergence of the weak state discourse in international politics after the fall of the European empire to explore how a special form of the political has come to haunt the discourse of the weak/failed states.
My overarching goal is to tease out some ideas about whether Yemen as a weak state has become a space of double exception; the modern Nomos zone of exception as well as its own exception. Against the conventional wisdom about the withering away of the Yemeni state, I suggest that it is theoretically productive to approach the Yemeni state as a state, which is haunted by a spectre of sovereign colonial past that continues to rely on “stateless” spaces outside its frontier to maintain its own peace and order.
Nomos
Before I proceed, a word on the meaning of nomos is in order. “[N]omos comes from nemein—a [Greek] word that means both “to divide” and “to pasture.” . . . [It is] the measure by which the land in a particular order is divide and situated . . . by which it becomes historically situated and turns a part of the earth’s surface into the force-field of a particular order.”[1] Schmitt refers to the spatial ordering, which was predicated on a complex matrix of discourse and practices applied both inside and in the colonies beyond the European frontiers. His conception of nomos seems in accord with Bourdieu’s notion field of power. If we approach international security as a field of power, then, and as Epstein puts it, “the nomos is what stakes out the possibilities of acting within a field of practices,”[2] where actors talk and act according to the way determined by the norms. Here, I am interested in the discourse of weak/failed states as an arrangement that preserves the old colonial authority in the post-colonial world, tethered to international security as a field of ordering. But how does this authoritative discourse make an affective presence in the context of weak states?
A Theatrical Weak State!
Bourdieu proposed that the state’s effects are felt when the “state thinks itself through those who attempt to think it.”[3] On this view, the effect of the state resides in the language repeatedly uttered and embodied by both those who represent a given state and those who speak on its behalf. Those who have closely followed the speeches of the ex-president of Yemen, the late Ali Abdullah Saleh, over three decades, can easily identify the ceaseless iteration of signifiers like “achieving/protecting the security and stability of Yemen.” These signifiers functioned as a national reminder that the Yemeni state is not yet there, but continues to aspire to fully assert its authority. Such an iteration was incessant to the extent that anxiety over and desire for security and stability (amn wa aesteqrar) have become an emblem of everyday life in Yemen.
The democratic mobilization of 2011 permitted the regime to put a theatrical weak state in full motion. From the outset, Saleh emphasized that “many Yemenis are concerned about the national security and stability, and they do have good reason for that.” The opposition (Joint Meeting Parties (JMPs), led by aIslah) and the protesters were depicted as the instigators of chaos, fauda, and terrorist enemies, who destabilized Yemen, weakened the state institutions and granted al-aQa‘ida a safe passage into some parts of the Yemeni territory.
Many Yemenis during the year-long 2011 protests experienced an increased sense of anxiety and insecurity due to the dramatic absence of the state. However, it was through this very absence that the presence of the state was deeply felt. Such an orchestrated absence carved out an image in Yemenis’ everyday life of chaos associated with the collapse of the state thereby bringing its subjects back in order. The state articulated itself through its sudden absence manifest in the escalation of food prices, the disappearance of the fuel and gas from the market as well as of the traffic officers from the roads, the piles of rubbish displayed in the streets, and the vanishing of security forces. This absence coincided with news about the fall of some parts of Yemen at the hand of al--Qa‘ida. The regime could mobilize a considerable number of the population against the protesters and the JMPs, allowing a political grouping to form against the enemy of security and stability, and to decide on the “critical situation.”[4]
For Carl Schmitt, the state as a political entity exercises the right to decide on the domestic enemy. When it constitutes the friend-enemy distinction it also affects the “utmost degree of intensity of a union and separation, of an association and dissociation.”[5] This includes deciding on the exception and calling upon its subjects to be ready to kill or to be killed in the name of protecting the state. It is in the realm of the friend-enemy grouping, Schmitt argues, that the state’s authority is exercised. Following this logic, the Yemeni state announced a state of emergency to mount a crackdown on the peaceful protesters necessary to enforce security and order.
Sovereignty Dislodged, Can it be Retained?
The 2011 Yemeni uprising also galvanized the anxiety of international and regional powers. They took it as a sign of the Yemeni state weakening and allowing al-aQa‘ida, the enemy to gain a foothold. Yemen had become not only a threat to itself, but also to world peace. The democratic uprising, therefore, had to be curtailed. A power-sharing transitional government was orchestrated by (the Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative) between the old regime and the opposition, with the then vice president as the sole presidential candidate to be elected in a national referendum, held in February 2012.
In his speech leading to the referendum, Hadi repainted the landscape of Yemeni politics with the same colours: “The chaos that invaded the entire Yemen has been exploited by al-aQa‘ida, the itakfiri, who sought to take control over many parts of Yemen. They took advantage of the absence of the state.” This was the moment when the new coalition led by Hadi agreed that the GCCI and its implementation mechanism would replace the Yemeni constitution during the transitional period. Recognized as such by international powers, the Yemeni state had to confess its weakness, and give up its sovereignty and its political capacity for its own survival against the democratic upheaval. The uprising had to be de-democratized.
Almost two years later, in September 2014, the Houthis, allied with Saleh against Hadi government, and seized the capital, Sana’a. They declared that the GCCI curtailed the democratic aspiration of Yemenis, therefore, their act was a continuation of the 2011 “revolution.” The Houthi-Saleh alliance captured the state institutions in Sana’a. They claimed they were protecting the integrity of the Yemeni state from the Hadi government, which had become an instrument in the hand of the international-regional powers.
If the Houthis’ advancement echoed the Schmittian’s telluric[6] partisan, who denounced a “real territorial and equal enemy” (Hadi government) and reclaimed territorial sovereignty and the political, then, one might argue that this attempt was short-lived. While many analysts were quick to affiliate the Houthis with Iran, the Houthis were initially seeking political recognition from the United States. This was evident in their vocabularies that appealed to the “War on Terrorism.”
As the Houthis and Saleh started to expand their reach in the government, Houthis’ political leaders and popular gatherings were targeted. And new fronts were opened in Amran and elsewhere, against Hadi’s forces and al-Islaah, or what the Houthis called “itakfiri, adawa’ish (ISIS)” and all forces that targeted the revolution. In early March 2015, Mohammad Abdul Salam, the spokesperson of the Houthi movement stated: “those figures are the ones who colluded with the itakfiri and gave them a safe passage to Sana’a to commit crimes and incite a civil war . . . the state was about to collapse, but we saved it.”
While the Houthis explained their advancement to the South as part of their fight against terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qa‘ida, Hadi dispatched a letter to the regional power, calling upon the regional and international power to intervene militarily. He lamented, that the Houthis’ advancement in the south mirrored an imminent collapse of the weak Yemeni state as well as a rapid expansion of the Iranian influence in Arabia. According to Hadi, this meant an Iranian control over the strategic waterway of Bab al-Manadab, affecting oil shipment from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia-led coalition (backed by the United States and other European countries) announced its support to the Hadi government and immediately launched the Operation-Decisive-Storm.[7] Houthis accused the Hadi government of treason, and opened new fronts of exceptions against their elements in Taiz, Aden, al-Mukalla, or what they called, takfiri. They believe that they inherited a “weak state” but they could still hold it together even when attacked by the world’s wealthiest nations. Hadi today claims that Houthis have helped actualized one of the most dangerous Iranian agenda in Arabia. Hence his call to eliminate the “militias” as the only way to retain the state.
The political scene in Yemen since the 2011 uprising is characterized by the friend-enemy grouping as both factions declared each other as the ultimate enemy that needed to be liquidated. Both have mobilized their allies internationally, regionally and nationally, and are prepared to kill and be killed in the name of protecting or retaining the weak Yemeni state.
Backed by the United States, the Saudi led coalition is the powerful third party for whom the political force in Yemen to be supported is not the Houthis, but the Hadi government. How did that affect the political position of the Houthis as partisans? To Schmitt, the partisan needs political recognition “in order to avoid falling like the thief and the pirate into the unpolitical, the criminal sphere.”[8] The Houthis, however, failed to secure such a recognition and eventually became associated with Iran (a rogue state) – an enemy requiring annihilation.
Here it is necessary to discuss the discursive formation of anxiety over security and stability associated with the weak Yemeni state, which has been captured by both Houthis, Hadi and Saleh before. This will enable us to better understand the way the friend-enemy distinction, and the way the ailing Yemeni state embody the political within the field of international security.
The Birth of a Republican State
The concerns over the Yemeni state, its security, and stability are embedded in the history of the Cold War. The Cold War witnessed the postcolonial moment, associated with the rise of US security concerns over the emergence of new unfriendly “communist” states, controlled by the USSR. This trepidation was evident in the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, when exporting Cold-War to the Middle East became official, following Nasir’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.
The Doctrine addressed the USSR threat and the US role in protecting the independence of the Middle Eastern countries.[9] It “pledged increased economic and military aid and even direct U.S. protection to any Middle Eastern nation willing to acknowledge the threat posed by international communism” to the freedom of Middle Eastern peoples.[10]
It goes without saying that the development aid offered by the United States and Gulf countries, for which the new emerging states were desperate, created dependent politics and weak economies in many of these states, including Yemen.
The news about the fall of the Mutawakeli Imamate in North Yemen and the birth of the first republic in the Arabian Peninsula in 1962 frightened the House of Saud. The chain of events that followed can explain their fear. The Gulf monarchs had to watch Nasir’s troop land in Yemen to support al-Salal government only a few weeks after the republican government was proclaimed. The main anxiety was that the sentiments raised by Arab-nationalists led by Egypt’s Nasir, might spill over to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Due to its proximity to the Gulf and to secure recognition, the Yemeni traditional republicans were impelled to embrace a discourse of protecting the “neophyte and vulnerable” republic; a “liberal” republic that did not pose any threat to the security of American oil and military interests in the Gulf. Democratic aspirations and geographical location, however, were a mismatch.
The logic of the Cold War thus made Yemen as part of the battlefield between the two world’s powers. The rise of communism in the south, who collaborated with marginalized elements of Arab-nationalist in the north made the security of the new republic all the more pressing. For the outlaw elements had attempted to topple what they called the “backward” government in the north and to export revolution to the Gulf.
The Gulf War and War on Terror only amplified the anxiety over Yemen, which by then had been upgraded from a regional to a global threat as the enemy changed from the “communist” to the “Islamist.” It was through this history that friend-enemy distinction was signified to denote the communist threat to the newly formed fragile Yemeni state, whose security was, by then, part and parcel of the Gulf states’ security (central to US-European security interests in the region).
The Cold War politics and the placement of Yemen in it still does not fully account for the origin of the “weak state” as a prerequisite to understanding its significance to the unique character of the political that has come to haunt this very weak state. I suggest that the origin of the weak state can be found in the transformation of the nature of the political that followed the collapse of the Jus Publicum Europaeum as outlined by Schmitt, when the idea of the state as strictly a European construct collapsed.
Old Nomos in the New; Weak States Discourse, Colonialism by New Means
In Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt speaks of Jus Publicum Europaeum or the Westphalian state system, when enmity among European equals was regulated, to be the perfect articulation of the political. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Eurocentric Westphalian-based international law served as an interventionist mechanism that justified European colonial conquest under “civilizational mission” to tame lands, where the so-called state of nature prevailed. The “amity line” designated “free [stateless] and empty lands” beyond the European frontier as “a conflict zone outside Europe,” contributing to the bracketing of European wars.[11] The notion of a zone of exception, stateless, or “free and empty space” beyond the European borders were “designated for agonal tests of strength . . . a desolate chaos of mutual destruction”[12] among European states. It was through the “bracketing” of the European civil and religious conflicts, by displacing them in the stateless space of conquest “colonies” beyond European frontiers, that peace in Europe was possible.
The demise of the old Nomos, Jus Publicum Europaeum, the rise of decolonization and the American universalism (the new Nomos), according to Schmitt, displaced the political. What followed was a shift from non-European land appropriation by equal European enemies to the rise of the American universalism as an abstract notion. Here, Schmitt also referrers to universalizing and extending the state’s sovereignty to non-European and newly independent states. His Eurocentric explanation certainly rings true among Western foreign policy circles. Schmitt deemed these new states to be lacking “any spatial or spiritual consciousness of what they once had had in common, a chaos of reputedly equal and sovereign states and their dispersed possessions, in which a common bracketing of war no longer was feasible, and for which not even the concept of “civilization” could provide any concrete homogeneity.”[13]
To Schmitt, the idea of a modern sovereign state emerged out of a secularised Christian history of war and peace in Europe. Extending the spirit of the modern state to the non-West, would have two consequences. First, the history that resulted in the rise of European sovereign state is lacking in the non-Europe. The implication is that sovereign state will be no more than an empty signifier that lacks the “civilizational” content. Non-European are until today as “uncivilized” (aka undemocratic, unsecularized, unmodern, underdeveloped, weak, etcetera) cannot be equal to the Western state (democratic, secularised, modern, strong); thus, cannot embody a sovereignty which is European in content, spirit, and consciousness. To him, the most problematic part of it all is that if non-European lands are to be granted sovereignty, then, the space of exception on which Europe and the European sovereignty, and the political, were founded will cease to exist. For the very zones of exception that made the bracketing of European conflicts possible will cease to exist; therefore, Europe is no longer immune to war and violence.
However, and as Annmaria Shimabuku argues, the new Nomos did not compromise the sovereignty of the old. Rather, the old Nomos has become part and parcel of a new “existential form” on which sovereignty was fabricated in a new political order governed by a market rationality (e.g., Marshall Plan).[14] And the non-European new states remained incompetent and cannot be perceived as equal sovereign to American and Western Europeans.
The anxiety that violence would come back to haunt the frontiers of the modern Nomos replaced the “stateless” “empty lands” designated as zones of exceptions during European colonialism with new vocabularies of exception; “rogue, weak, collapsed, lawless, tribal, failed states.” These have become the modern zones of exception, where interventions are perpetually authorized in the name of securing world peace (of the US and European territories and their political and economic interest in the non-European cotenants), threatened by dictators and terrorists. As a result, non-European states are routinely subjected to discipline by Western powers, led by the United States. In most Middle Eastern countries, partial sovereignty and political capacity are granted to them so long as they open their lands for a free market economy as well as US military bases. It is a partial sovereignty that can be retained whenever the United States decides to intervene.
In Yemen’s current conflict, Hadi, the national party the United States has decided to rescue and offer political recognition to, is no longer fighting a real domestic enemy. He is fighting a criminalized Houthi militia; an extension of the rogue state of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula. According to Schmitt, when the notion of enmity shifts from real to absolute, the nature of violence at the heart of the political shifts. Violence ceases to have political stakes at the domestic territory; for the domestic party, the aim is the annihilation of the absolute enemy within “weak” territory to maintain the political at the international locus. That is, the national forces “has all come under an international and transnational central control that provides assistance and support, but only in the interest of its own quite distinct world-aggressive purposes.”[15] The domestic party supported by the third “becomes a manipulated cog . . . simply sent to slaughter, and betrayed of everything he was fighting for.”[16] The weak state, it seems, has ceased to have political stakes attached to its violence, as the political stakes in this fight are monopolized by the modern Nomos, making the annihilation of the weak state and its subjects a necessary condition for a secured world as imagined by the modern Nomos.
If the “empty and free land” helped Europe discover and secure itself, then, failed states have come to serve almost the same function for the modern Nomos led by American universal democracy. Timothy Mitchel aptly argues that Western democracy, found on the new order of political economy the United States presided over, necessitated the designation of the Middle East as inappropriate zones for democracy.[17] It appears that Middle Eastern weak and failed states serve the same purpose as “empty lands” did during the colonial times. In the post-1947 world, securing democracy in Western lands logically entails and is manifest in what Ahmad[18] describes as de-democratization in the Middle East and elsewhere.
As for a failing state like Yemen, I wonder what has become of it. Has it become a space of double exception, the modern Nomos zone of exception as well as its own exception? Has its ailing body politic, so to speak, become haunted by a spectre of a colonial sovereign past whose logic has long depended on weak spaces as its outside to displace its violence?
[1] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, translated by G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2007), 70.
[2] Charlotte Epstein, “Bourdieu’s nomos, or the structural power of norms,” in Bourdieu in International Relations, edited by Rebecca Adler-Nissen (New York: Routledge, 2013), 171.
[3] Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structures of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12, no.1(1994),1-18, 2. I also follow Bourdieu and other thinkers, who theories the state based on its ultimate function (maintaining public order).
[4] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 38.
[5] Ibid., 26.
[6] According to Schmitt, a tellurian character is he who fights a national enemy on a national soil and for national interests.
[7] To argue that the Saudis had the full power to decide on the exception in Yemen against the will of the United States and the so-called international community is a bogus claim. This war would not have happened without securing support and consent from the United States and some European powers. Adel Jubair announces the launch of the military operation from Washington, and most of the targets, until today, are decided by the United States. Further, a recent report has demonstrated the US interest in continuing its involvement in the war against Yemen. See https://theintercept.com/2018/09/12/yemen-pompeo-uae-saudi-certification-human-rights/
[8] Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan (New York: Telos, [1963] 2007), 53.
[9] Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Schmitt, The Nomos, 97-198.
[12] Ibid., 99.
[13] Ibid., 234.
[14] Annmaria Shimabuku, “Schmitt and Foucault on the Question of Sovereignty under Military Occupation,” Política Común 5 (2014). She pertinently demonstrates that the traditional sovereignty and its “existential form” was “a tightly knit network of sovereignties that together fabricated the “jus publicum Europaeum.” According to Shimabuku, if any of these sovereignties exercised its own power or other states’ powers it could do that only by reproducing and maintaining the field on which they originated (Westphalia).
[15] Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 52.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (London: Verso, 2011), 10.
[18] Irfan Ahmad, “Democracy and Islam,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 37, no.4 (2011), 459-470.