Roundtable: Backdrop & Reverberations of Soleimani’s Assassination (Part 2: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen)

Funeral of Qassem Suleimani in Tehran (7 January 2020). Image by saeediex via Shutterstock. Funeral of Qassem Suleimani in Tehran (7 January 2020). Image by saeediex via Shutterstock.

Roundtable: Backdrop & Reverberations of Soleimani’s Assassination (Part 2: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen)

By : Omar Sirri, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, and Samer Abboud

[On 3 January 2020, the United States assassinated Major General Qassem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Corps Guard (IRGC). The event was an escalation by the Trump Administration in what many critical analysts consider a decades-long war waged by the United States against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a two-part roundtable convened by Arash Davari, Naveed Mansoori, and Ziad Abu-Rish on the regional backdrop and (admittedly short-term) fallout from the US assassination of Soleimani. In this part, Omar Sirri, Stacey Yadav Philbrick, and Samer Abboud reflect on the specific nature of Iranian policy in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, respectively, and reactions therein to Soleimani’s assassination. Part 1 features scholars of Iran reflecting on the place of Soleimani and the IRGC in the political and institutional dynamics of the Iranian state.]

Question 1: What are the broad outlines of Iranian foreign policy in and their effects on the political, military, and economic status quo in your country of research prior to the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani?


Omar Sirri (on Iraq):
 Parastatal armed groups define Iraq’s political theatre. The public attention afforded these actors often stems from the Iranian support they receive—at least the most powerful ones, like the Badr Organization, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Kita’ib Hizballah, and others. Such groups have for years been implicated in violence against domestic and foreign foes alike, coercive practices that many suggest serve Iranian interests first. These Iraqi groups are key actors in the Iran-US conflict, as was most recently made clear with the US strike on Kita’ib Hizballah at the end of last year that killed at least twenty-five people.  

Iran’s economic interests in Iraq, by comparison, receive little attention. Iraq is a huge recipient of Iran’s non-oil exports. Mini-marts and supermarkets in Baghdad, Basra, Suleimaniya, and elsewhere are packed with Iranian imports—including dairy products, potato chips, and chocolates. Probably the best-known good that has flooded Iraqi streets in the last decade is the Saba, an inexpensive vehicle from Iranian automaker Saipa. It is particularly popular among young and aspiring taxi drivers facing few-to-no job prospects. The car is also infamous, gaining a “rotten reputation” for its inadequate air conditioning during sweltering summer months, and for the inexperienced (and “bad”) drivers who operate them. 

Such market penetration has helped to reshape social and economic life in Iraq—including the environment—in ways we have not fully appreciated or grappled with. Arguably, and ironically, the “free market” regime that Paul Bremer and the Bush Administration established in Iraq in 2003 most benefited Iranian exporters. A rudimentary understanding of macroeconomics suggests that such trade policies—which include incentivising cheap imports—make developing a productive and sustainable national economy practically impossible (let alone one crippled by decades of war and sanctions). These “free-market” policies are what helped decimate industry and agricultural production in Iraq after 2003.

This is why Iran’s support for parastatal armed actors also known as militias are not the only reason Iraq’s revolutionaries are calling for “Iran out.” It is not hard to find Iraqis who refuse to purchase Iranian goods out of principle—much like active supporters of Palestinian rights who never buy Sabra hummus. But today, such atomized resistance has found a collective outlet in the revolution, such as through grassroots “buy Iraqi” efforts being promoted by protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

Popular resistance to Iranian intervention in Iraq did not start with this revolution. For example, civil society activists have for years been organising against devastating Iranian (and Turkish) environmental policies, namely river water diversion and damming. While climate change is having catastrophic impacts on Iraq’s environment, Iranian policies are hastening these outcomes. Against minimal Iraqi government efforts to resist these hardly-neighbourly interventions, activists have sought to build a regional and international solidarity campaign to save the land of the two rivers from those whose interests are helping bring about its destruction.

Stacey Philbrick Yadav (on Yemen): Yemen’s political, military, and economic status quo is defined by a punishing civil war. The collective effects of five years of intense military conflict, diplomatic paralysis, and international indifference have left the country politically and socially fragmented with an economy in ruins as millions of civilians struggle to meet their most basic needs. Iran neither created this war, nor will Iranian policy end it (alone). Yet Iran’s alliance with the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah, as they prefer to be called today) and the former’s adversarial relationship to several of Yemen’s Gulf neighbors jointly shape the conflict dynamics that have caused so much suffering over the past five years of war. As noted in the second question, this idea—that the Houthis find an ally in Iran—differs from the proxy framing in that it recognizes that the Houthi insurgency predates substantial Iranian involvement. It has existed as an armed movement since 2004, and developed out of a broader populist movement during the 1990s. President Ali Abdullah Saleh (r. 1990–2012) alleged an outsized role for Iran throughout the 2000s in order to generate security assistance and create political cover for some of his domestic policies. (This worked, even though US officials knew Saleh’s claims were exaggerated.)

Iran’s support for the Houthi movement accelerated substantially when the movement was excluded from the externally-brokered power-sharing agreement that followed Saleh’s 2012 resignation. By the end of the 2012-14 “transitional process”—according to a framework designed by the GCC to limit the power of both the Houthi movement and Southern secessionists (al-Hirak al-Janubi)—other militias aligned with the movement already held a good deal of territory in North Yemen.

During the war itself, Iranian involvement in Yemen has been most pronounced in areas under Houthi control and has extended from military support toward governance functions. Some of the reported policies of the Houthis are not direct extensions of Iranian policies. For example, Iran’s representative institutions have not been replicated, nor are Yemeni women experiencing the kind of (circumscribed but sanctioned) mobility to which Iranian women are entitled. Houthi rule in the north appears to combine elements of martial law, practices modified from Iranian models, and some conservative social practices familiar to North Yemenis of different religious backgrounds. 

Iranian policy thus appears to be less about making an Islamic Republic of Yemen in Sana’a than about adopting the low-cost strategy of supporting a winning ally as it attempts to govern. It may seem odd to describe the Houthi movement as “winners,” given that their militias have been stalled along largely stable battle lines for several years. But to the extent that they have survived a deeply asymmetric war for five years, hardened by almost a decade of insurgent war against the Yemeni state, the Houthi movement should be seen as a formidable ally. Moreover, since both military and diplomatic dynamics suggest that the Houthis do not aspire to govern the whole of Yemen but rather seek considerable regional autonomy and a part in power-sharing, any negotiated settlement that includes the Houthis would leave Iran with some path to continued political influence on the Arabian Peninsula—all with minimal direct military engagement.

Indeed, Iranian military engagement is outmatched by that of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which have played a much more substantial military role in the conflict, though it is far less common to see their relationships to Yemeni actors described in the same language of proxies. Certainly, the Gulf Cooperation Council’s desire to limit the power of the Houthi movement during Yemen’s transitional period (2012–14) had something to do with its member states’ concerns about Iranian influence on the Arabian Peninsula. Yet it was also inflected by the anti-Shi‘ism of Gulf regimes and by the domestic political preferences of some of the Gulf states’ own Yemeni allies. The Islah Party, in particular, was a significant beneficiary of the transitional process, even its relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood made this politically challenging to some Gulf allies. To treat any foreign policy—whether Iranian, Saudi, Emirati, or US—as existing outside of the pull of domestic constituencies is indefensibly statist.

Samer Abboud (on Syria): Iranian policy toward Syria has been principally focused on the battlefield and ensuring the survival of the Syrian regime. Any alternative to the current regime, especially one molded in the vision of US, Saudi, or Turkish interests, would have been strategically catastrophic for Iran. Iran has pursued a policy of regime survival through two modes. The first is military support and coordination with a whole range of military actors operating on the Syrian battlefield. There is obviously a deep connection with Hizballah and the Syrian and Russian militaries. Beyond this, Iran has supported and financed a number of militia groups composed of Syrians and non-Syrians who operated in specific Syrian locales. The Syrian regime-organized National Defense Forces (NDF) was also partially funded by Iran and some of its leaders were believed to have gone to Iran for military training. The second is a combination of indeterminable financial support, trade and barter deals, and the funneling of Iranian private sector investment into Syria. In other words, the effort to preserve the regime has been total. Since early 2017, Iran, Russia, and Turkey have been involved in a series of “talks,” commonly referred to as the Astana Process, that have the veneer of peace negotiations but are really about the management of the Syrian battlefield and in ensuring tripartite consensus over key issues of regional contention in Syria. For example, both the major Russian-led offensive in Idlib governorate that began in April 2019 and the Turkish intervention into northeastern Syria in October 2019, were military moves discussed and approved within this tripartite mechanism. This process is mostly issue- or time-specific; the parties meet to discuss specific “problems” and agree on a strategy moving forward, thus minimizing tripartite conflict and laying the basis for a Syrian future under tripartite suzerainty as the mechanism has no foreseeable termination. No major decisions about the Syrian battlefield are occurring outside of the Astana process. As such, Iranian, Russia, or Turkish capacity to act unilaterally is limited. Parallel to this, there are efforts toward some form of political transition. The best example of this is the United Nations-led Syrian Constitutional Committee (SCC), founded in 2019. But this is a mostly cosmetic process that is lower on the Iranian policy radar.

There is no serious reason to believe that these dynamics of Iranian intervention in Syria will change at all after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. He was neither the sole architect or visionary of Iran’s role. The status quo is not seriously threatened by Soleimani’s assassination.     

Question 2: Much of the discussion about Iranian-allied groups in regional states is framed within the model of proxies. What is your assessment of the utility of this model in understanding the relationship between specific power brokers and/or other groups and the Iranian regime?


Omar Sirri (on Iraq):
 The term “proxy” gives the sense that a local actor is solely doing the bidding of an external actor. At least this is how it is used in popular representations and mainstream media. But Iraqi political actors (armed groups among them) that are allied with and/or and backed by Iran cannot be exclusively characterized as such. This is because Iraq’s domestic political actors— Iranian-supported or otherwise—have embedded their own private interests into the everyday sources of power in the country. They derive a great deal of their private political dominance not merely from external actors, but from the ways in which they control ostensibly public resources and institutions. These micro sources of power are brought about and then reinforced through largely domestic capital accumulation and coercion—from financial profit and the exercise of violence. I try to capture the ways in which this occurs in Iraq in this POMEPS piece (the entire collection of essays on Iraq is fantastic), and in this ongoing LSE project.

Another reason why the “proxy” label is unfulfilling relates to political Islam. The power of al-Marja‘iyya in Najaf cannot be over-emphasized. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s insistence that his followers mobilize to help rout Da‘ish from Iraq did more to form al-Hashd al-Sha‘bi than Iran’s intervention. These religious actors espouse and promote particular versions of Iraqi nationalism that, while Shi‘a-centric, ultimately reject Iranian dominance. The political actors who receive support from Iran have to contend with these political-religious conditions that suggest popular legitimacy, power, and relevance come from Iraqi religious actors more than from Iranian ones.

This is to say nothing of Muqtada al-Sadr. There are few figures in Iraq who can “move the street” like he can—or at least a significant segment of it. In addition, a great deal of his popular support is derived from lower classes in and out of Baghdad. Some of those same people make up a portion of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square demanding an end to Iranian (and US) interference in Iraq’s affairs. These intersections are kind of incredible. But they also mean that at the moment “proxy” is doing more to occlude critical details rather than illuminate them. 

Stacey Philbrick Yadav (on Yemen): At a public lecture about a decade ago, I was asked why I decided to study “small and insignificant places like Yemen and Lebanon instead of important ones like Iran or Saudi Arabia.” Whenever people ask me about proxy dynamics in Yemen, I think back on that question because I find the discussion of proxies to be underwritten by a similar logic. To describe Yemeni actors as Iran’s proxies seems built on the idea that some countries (i.e., those that have proxies) “matter” more and others become significant only by association. So I have always tried to resist that moral economy, since it does not correspond to my view of what makes something—let alone someone—significant. But that is an affective response.

Conceptually, even though the idea of proxy war recognizes the central significance of sub-state actors (i.e., proxies), it simultaneously reinforces the (misplaced) centrality of states as the core units of analysis in international relations. A conflict is only described as a proxy war when another state or states is involved. In the case of Yemen, the Houthi movement matters to policy analysts (and to a surprising number of political scientists) insofar as it functions as an instrument of the Iranian state. I see several reasons to object to this. First, proxy framing underestimates the actors and forms of agency that shape relationships between allies. It directs us away from the domestic politics of both Yemen and Iran and the way each shapes alliance choices and practices. Second, scholars and policy analysts rarely use the same language to describe relationships between other states and the substate Yemeni factions with which they are aligned. For example, it’s rare to hear the Southern Transitional Council described as an Emirati proxy, even though it depends heavily on the material and political support of the United Arab Emirates. The Islah party and militias aligned with it are more often described as allies of Saudi Arabia, not Saudi proxies. We would be asking better questions if we approached all such relationships between external and Yemeni actors as alliances and sought to better understand what each party does and does not expect from its allies, how these alliances relate to domestic politics on both sides, and how competing interests are managed. The relationship between Iran and the Houthi movement does not strike me as so exceptional as to warrant different language and different analytical treatment.  

Finally, this special focus on Iran’s relationship to the Houthi movement has contributed to a very lopsided approach to understanding the conflict in binary terms—a framing concretized by the UN Security Council resolution that authorized the Saudi-led coalition’s campaign in 2015. Whereas there is ample evidence that the war is being fought along several different axes simultaneously. I do not find it farfetched to say that reduction of the war in Yemen to a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran has substantively delayed a negotiated settlement to the war and prolonged the suffering of Yemeni civilians.

Samer Abboud (on Syria): The proxy argument assumes a hegemony and hierarchy between Iran and allied groups in the region that I simply do not think exists. To accept the proxy argument, we need to remove all motivations and capacities of the groups we are referring to, assuming that they simply do what Iranian leadership tell them. However, this removes any agency on the part of the so-called proxies and does not allow us to take seriously questions of negotiation, compromise, and disagreement between parties, which I think exists. A more appropriate analytic may be that of “alignment.” It allows us to understand both the coherency and tensions within the interrelationships that constitute the network of states and armed actors broadly supportive of the Syrian regime. These interrelationships are what we are trying to understand and explain. I see no good reason why we need to elevate the proxy argument whenever we see an overlap of interests and strategies. 

Thinking in terms of alignment rather than proxies allows for some nuance in how we see different actors in Syria. Consider, for example, the fourth and fifth military divisions of the Syrian Army. They have been reincarnated with different names and leaderships in recent years. It is nevertheless well known that the fifth division coordinates operations with Iranian officials and receives support and training from them, while the fourth was virtually under the command of the Russian military presence in Syria. How can we account for such fissures within the Syrian army? Are these divisions merely proxies of either state? Or are they competing centers of power that are malleable to battlefield and political conditions? The proxy argument has ready-made answers to questions of power, competition, strategy, and coordination that shift our attention away from how the interrelationships between actors are constituted. 

Question 3: What has been the reaction to and/or effect of Soleimani’s death in different sectors of your research country? Has this reaction reaffirmed and/or challenges certain assumptions (and if so how)?


Omar Sirri (on Iraq):
 Overwhelming fear. Many were right to assume after Soleimani’s assassination that Iraq would become the battlefield on which US and Iranian forces would fight and kill (if it is not already). This meant Iraqis would continue to suffer the most. Had the conflict escalated, some of the worst predictions about the ramifications of his assassination were probably the right ones—just as they were about the US- and UK-led invasion in 2003. Also understandable were the reactions of activists and civil society actors who refused to shed a tear for Soleimani’s demise. He symbolized Iranian intrusions in Iraqi political affairs precisely because he coordinated and supervised them. This is where the earlier proxy argument stems from: Iran’s support for parastatal armed actors in Iraq is real. Most citizens blame these groups for some of Iraq’s worst civil violence, in Baghdad and elsewhere. Iran’s support helped fuel that violence, hence the popular loathing directed at it.

Lost in the media mayhem around Soleimani’s killing was that of Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis. As the deputy head of al-Hashd al-Sha‘bi, his assassination is stunning in its own right. Al-Hashd al-Sha‘bi became an official state institution in 2016 and al-Muhandis is a key power broker and centralising force among the discrete, competing groups that make up the organization. It is still unclear what his killing will mean for al-Hashd al-Sha‘bi, its component groups, and their respective political-economic interests for which they all scrape.

As the geopolitical tensions ratchet down, I wonder how useful it is to suggest that these events are the “death knell” for Iraq’s revolutionary moment. The structural economic conditions that brought about this revolution persist. The political-economic elite certainly benefit from persistent “instability” and precarity; Iraq’s last decade and a half prove this. But the last three months in Iraq also suggest something entirely new and powerful has occurred and been nurtured by Iraqis of various classes and generations. The longevity of this popular mobilization indicates that a radically different political agency is here to stay—one in which its participants have withstood some of the most rank and vicious political violence carried out by Iraq’s ruling class. This is not a prediction but a reflection: The stubborn failure of Iraq’s politicians to address people’s grievances likely means those airing them are not going anywhere.

Stacey Philbrick Yadav (on Yemen): In the context of a protracted civil war, reactions to Soleimani’s death have been characteristically divided. On the one hand, some prominent Yemenis (and Yemeni Americans) explicitly celebrated his killing—which initially surprised me. Many of the same people have been deeply critical of US drone strikes conducted in Yemen. On the other hand, thousands of people turned out for official mourning proceedings in Sana’a. Some observers said this was required by Houthi authorities; it is hard to actually assess these claims from afar, but I can say that some Yemeni friends who have associations with the United States chose to leave the capital for a while to avoid the perceived risk of retaliation.

The most depressing reaction—though not unexpected—has been the policing of independent voices online. Yemenis who have tried to challenge the “celebrators” by pointing to the damage that unchecked US air strikes and drone attacks have caused in Yemen have been shouted down as Houthi “sympathizers.”  In other words, it remains very difficult for Yemenis (and non-Yemenis, frankly) to speak about the war, about Iran, about almost anything having to do with the conflict without it being interpreted in a Manichean, deeply polarized way. The independent center—never an easy place for Yemeni activists or analysts—is shrinking still.

Samer Abboud (on Syria): I think it is reasonable to assume that Soleimani’s assassination will not have a significant impact on Iranian policy in Syria more generally, or the battlefield in particular. Soleimani was indeed an important figure in Syria but he was not active merely as an individual—but as a representative of a state. Nor did he command any specific allegiances in Syria that may disrupt the network of regime-aligned groups. Nevertheless, he was a very public and polarizing figure in Syria as his presence on the battlefield was regularly documented and shared online. Soleimani thus came to personify Iran’s intervention into Syria. As such, like everything related to Syria, the range of responses to Soleimani’s assassination were polarizing and ran the gamut from celebration to mourning. 

The more consequential impact of Soleimani’s assassination will be in the long-term as we see how, if at all, Hizballah’s declared strategy of ridding the region of US occupation plays out. In Syria, Russian military officials have been successful in striking a confounding balance between different forces and interests on the ground. For example, they permit regular Israeli air strikes and the presence of US military bases while maintaining alignment with Iran, other armed groups, and the Syrian regime. Should there be a shift in the strategies of Hizballah and other armed groups toward direct engagement with the US military presence in Syria, then this delicate balance will not hold and we could see the emergence of a very different conflict. 

[Click here to read Part 1 of this roundtable, featuring scholars of Iran reflecting on the place of Soleimani and the IRGC in the political and institutional dynamics of the Iranian state.]

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya`s electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.]

(1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally?

When I first began studying Arabic and, subsequently, formulating a research project in Yemen in the early 2000s, I did not consider myself to be working in or on the "Arabian Peninsula," as such. Rather, what drew me to Yemen was its historical, geographical, and cultural distinctiveness, which remains even now quite remarkable, but which nevertheless often obscures the relations, connections, and shared histories and presents that do exist within the region and beyond. This oversight is born perhaps out of what Sheila Carapico identified nearly ten years ago as a pernicious "dualism" that shaped not only American research agendas, but also the stereotypical conceptions, popular and academic, of "the Gulf" (rather than the peninsula as a whole): "Yemen is kaleidoscopic; the Gulf is monochrome…The Gulf is good for business; Yemen is good for ethnography" (Carapico 2004).

This same oversight—what Adam Hanieh in his response discusses as a "methodological nationalism"—is also born out of what we may call a secondary Orientalism: a way of "knowing" that considers the majority of the Arabian Peninsula without "culture" and without "history" in comparison to the Arab states of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. This fallacy has been exacerbated, of course, by the relative difficulty for short-term visitors and new scholars of actually engaging on a deeper level with the citizenry in countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it may be easier to befriend migrants from Egypt or Sri Lanka than its small minority of "nationals." As a result, although there have been notable exceptions—including recent scholarship on the political economy, political ecology, and youth and urban cultures in Saudi Arabia, in addition to an older, rich tradition of studies on kinship and its Bedouin—anthropological scholarship on Gulf-state citizens has seemed relatively flat in comparison to the "thicker" ethnographies of migrant populations in "the Gulf" and of "tribal" communities in Yemen. In both cases, these research foci emerge from the historically dominant approaches to these "two" areas: oil and security in the Gulf (and its resulting dependence on cheap, imported labor) and state-tribe relations in Yemen (and related studies on tribalism, sociality and gender). Nevertheless, they are also being productively complicated by theoretically informed analyses of space, political subjectivities, and belonging. A similar and amplified turn to non-labor migrant populations in the Gulf (as in the work of Mandana Limbert in Oman) and non-tribal populations in Yemen (such as Marina de Regt’s work on Ethiopian domestic workers or Susanne Dahlgren on the public sphere in Aden) remains welcome.

As for the difficulties in carrying out, rather than framing, research in the Arabian Peninsula, the challenges of conducting research in Yemen may be somewhat distinct. Adam Hanieh, Ahmed Kanna, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Neha Vora have touched on the lack of (Western) research institutes and networks in the Gulf, the dearth of statistical data, and the difficulty of gaining unmediated access. In Yemen, a robust network of foreign research institutes work in tandem with several Yemeni research and studies centers to house and fund scholars and to facilitate their research there. These include the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), the French Center in Sana’a for Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In the early 2000s, when I lived in Sanaa, these centers supported a vibrant research community of both foreign and Yemeni scholars who frequented their libraries and attended their talks. The deteriorating security situation in Yemen and the subsequent evaporation of US funding for in-country research has had an unfortunate impact on these centers, which, during my visits in recent years, have appeared particularly vacant. Still, even with this institutional support, it could be challenging to be an anthropologist in Yemen. For one, as Ahmed Kanna notes, anthropology is one of the less known and less understood of the social science disciplines. And when my Yemeni acquaintances did have an understanding of anthropology, they were also well aware and suspicious of its colonial and imperial legacy. This was made clear to me when a professor of anthropology at Sanaa University asked me in March 2003 in front of his class of students why the United States had not sent one hundred anthropologists to Iraq, instead of bombing it. Suspicion toward the discipline and a more general suspicion of foreign researchers as spies was not new. One only needs to read Steve Caton’s remarkable account of his arrest and imprisonment in 1980 to see what an effect such suspicions have had on the kind of knowledge that is produced. Indeed, in reflecting on his own encounter with the National Security in Raydah, Paul Dresch notes that it is often the most mundane of facts that are the most heavily guarded.

This was certainly true of my own experience of fieldwork in Socotra. Whereas I was made privy to various conspiracy theories, extra-marital affairs, secret religious conversions, etc.—all things I hesitated to take note of, much less write about—it was nearly impossible for me to ask my hosts quite straightforward questions about their genealogies, tribal structures, and political past. Of course, I was conducting research at a time when US presence in Iraq as well as in Yemen was acutely palpable. Moreover, it made little sense to my Socotran friends that a US student would receive funding to hang out in Socotra or anywhere else if she did not have significant ties to the political powers that be. As a result, I turned to and became more interested in Socotri poetry where people’s opinions, struggles, and contestations were more forcefully voiced. In so doing, I thus followed, or rather stumbled, in the footsteps of a group of scholars who work on poetry in Yemen, including Steve Caton, Flagg Miller, Lucine Taminian and Samuel Liebhaber, but without their expertise! Fortunately, such suspicions do ease over time. Although it has become even more difficult in the past five years for anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Yemen, now that I live in Abu Dhabi where I am easily accessible by telephone and where my current position is more comprehensible to my Socotran interlocutors, Socotrans are more comfortable reaching out to me, calling upon me for help, and working with me. I know that if I were to have the chance to return again for a lengthy period of time, fieldwork—in terms of the questions I could ask and the answers I would receive—would be very different this time.

(2) What are some of the new and innovative ways of thinking and theorizing the Arabian Peninsula and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these new theoretical interventions address elisions or tensions within more traditional approaches?

In my view, one of the most useful attempts to reframe and theorize the Arabian Peninsula occurred with the 2004 publication of Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (edited by Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis). It is here that Sheila Carapico issued her "Arabia Incognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies" cited above. Carapico’s is a research agenda that would bridge the conventional divide between Yemeni and Gulf Studies to focus on the interconnections between the inhabitants and nations of the peninsula as a whole. Whether in direct response to Carapico’s invitation or in reaction to the region’s most recent and emblematic transnational phenomena, such as the global “war on terror,” the emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the spread of the Arab uprisings, several scholars and even academic journals have now taken up this call. For example, in the past two years we have seen the 2011 launch of the Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea followed by, in 2013, the conversion and expansion of the journal Chroniques yéménites into Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, both focused on the Arabian Peninsula en bloc and from antiquity to present.

What is needed when it comes to theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, however, is not just an expansion of scope—a sort of micro "area studies"—but also scholarship that explicitly draws on and forwards this transnational and interdisciplinary peninsular perspective. This approach breaks with the traditional dualism described above in its recognition that one cannot adequately study migration, religious reformism, sectarian identities, state and popular (or cultural) sovereignty, youth cultures, urbanism, natural resource exploitation and conservation, gender transformations, heritage production, or class, etc., within one nation without at least recognizing the influences and entanglements of these phenomena throughout the peninsula and across its surrounding waters. New scholarship that exemplifies this approach includes, of course, Engseng Ho’s work on Hadhrami migration; Adam Hanieh’s work on transregional (Khaleeji) capital and class formation; Laurent Bonnefoy’s work on Salafism in Yemen (and yet highly contingent upon grassroots flows to and from Saudi Arabia); Steve Caton’s emerging research on water scarcity in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Gardner’s comparative studies of the kafala system in Bahrain and Qatar, among others.

Even in a relatively "remote" and off-shore location such as Socotra, this "peninsular" perspective is imperative to an understanding of the "local" and of how Socotra has been produced recently as a World Heritage Site and a "natural" biodiverse research laboratory. Yet, in the early stages of my research on the development, conservation, and heritagization of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, and perhaps due to the pervasiveness of the distinctions drawn between Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, I was surprised by the degree to which my Socotran friends and neighbors were oriented not toward Sanaa or Aden, but rather toward Salalah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Sharjah, Bani Yas, and Jeddah. It was the cities and representations of "the Gulf" and Saudi Arabia—not mainland Yemen—which captured their imaginations and fueled their aspirations. Indeed, I soon learned that I could not examine heritage production in Socotra—conventionally understood to be a "national" project—without first examining heritage projects and discourses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For example, the annual Festival of the Socotran Poet which, as I wrote about in MERIP last May, was transformed in 2012 into a platform for public debate on the viability of Socotra’s cultural and political sovereignty, was originally modeled after the United Arab Emirates’ reality television show, The Million’s Poet, created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (now the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority) to promote and safeguard national Emirati culture. This small example demonstrates to me the importance of seeing and understanding the peninsula holistically instead of continuing to bifurcate it into Yemen and the rest.

This is not to say, however, that the space and study of the Arabian Peninsula is any more "natural" than are the constructed borders of its nation-states. I agree with Toby Jones and John Willis’ deep reservations about area studies and about the "Arabian Peninsula" as yet another imperially produced category. As well as they state it here, these reservations are, of course, not new. And yet, as all of the contributors to this roundtable point out or imply, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf—Yemen, too (hence Lisa Wedeen’s book title, Peripheral Visions)—have long been treated as peripheral, geographically and conceptually, to the Middle East and to Middle East studies. One only needs to look through the bibliography of Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s excellent review article, "Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies," to note that ethnographies and anthropological articles situated in Egypt or in Palestine far outnumber the recent scholarship produced on all of the Arabian Peninsula states combined. There is thus obviously no a priori reason to theorize the "Arabian Peninsula"—but we may still learn a lot in doing so.

Here, at New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Pascal Ménoret, Justin Stearns, and I were hired into a nascent program named "Arab Crossroads Studies." During our first year teaching at NYUAD, we spent many hours debating both the merits and productivity of the name and the rationale for turning this then-concentration into a full-fledged undergraduate major. The legacy of US area studies’ Cold War roots was something we took seriously. What does "Arab Crossroads" even mean? And was it productive or just as flawed to move from a geographic focus, that is, Middle East studies, to a linguistic, cultural, and ethnic one: the Arab world? Even as these are questions we continue to ask, the renaming and reframing does something. If nothing else, it reminds me as a scholar and a teacher to focus more explicitly on the historical, political, economic, and social connections between the "Arab world" and its immediate surroundings (Africa, South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and Europe) as well as on the human, material, and conceptual "crossroads" within "it." In doing so, it draws our attention away from place and toward movement across space and within various spaces.

In treating the Arabian Peninsula as a "center" rather than a periphery, we are forced to widen our geographical focus and broaden our conceptual one. That is, we cannot design classes or research projects as if the "Arab world" or the "Middle East" begins in Morocco and ends in Muscat. Nor can we ignore the capital and labor flows that link South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant (and also to the United States). Finally, as Tom Looser has convincingly argued, it is with the export of Western universities and branch campuses to the Gulf and East Asia, for example, that area studies gains new salience. With the fashionable emphasis today on all things "global," a critical area studies approach can ground and situate an otherwise imperialist (and predominantly Western) sense of "global" knowledge and "cosmopolitan" belonging. Through the newly established "Arab Crossroads Studies" major at NYUAD, we seek to emphasize to our "global" students that their being here, in Abu Dhabi—in the Arabian Peninsula—does matter and that Abu Dhabi is not merely the "global" city it aspires to be, but that it, too, has been historically and politically produced. Included, however, among the required courses for all undergraduate majors is a "Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies" course: a course that examines area, area studies, and areas like the "Arabian Peninsula" critically, while asking what new theoretical interventions such a focus may uncover. We welcome further discussion on this!

(3) "Sectarianism" seems to have reemerged in popular and academic work on the Arabian Peninsula as both the label for and analytic of a socio-political phenomenon. What is the utility of both past and more recent formulations of "sectarianism" as an analytical tool for the study of the Arabian Peninsula? What challenges or problems have these formulations created?

This is an important question.  As I have not worked on sectarianism directly, however, I will defer here to the other roundtable participants.

(4) What is the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, etc.? What kind of attention has been given to local and regional knowledge production, if any?

I think it fair to say that the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics from the outside is growing stronger, while still remaining contingent upon or even hampered by the hegemonic status of English as the scholarly lingua franca. We see this even in the shift from French- and German-language publications to English-language ones. Serious scholarship produced by "Western" academics does rely on local scholarship and knowledge production, but more can and should be done to translate these works to make them more widely accessible. For example, I recently assigned Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation to my students at NYUAD. Kanna draws heavily and productively on the writings of Emirati scholar Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, thereby introducing his important work to Kanna’s English-language readership. As the majority of Abdullah’s articles have been published in Arabic, however, I am less able to assign them directly, meaning that "local" scholarship, like his, may be in danger of being presented or perceived as secondary to the English-language publications that build upon it.

Similarly, in my work on Socotra, I draw considerably on the texts written and published by the Socotran historian Ahmed al-Anbali (who resides in the United Arab Emirates), as well as on knowledge production by non-academics. The latter include Socotran guides, heritage brokers, and activists who, in response to and as a rejection of the international regime of "experts," are now fashioning themselves as what one may call "para-experts," engaged in an explicit and self-aware counter-form of knowledge production. Although I am mostly interested in the development and deployment of this parallel expertise (as opposed to the content itself), it remains a challenge to adequately present this knowledge production as scholarship and not just as ethnographic artifact. This is due in great part to what John Willis identifies as the incommensurable position of Yemeni academics in terms of their institutional and financial support and the different intellectual and political project in which they are engaged. Until recently, Socotran scholars were eager to promote a narrative of Socotran unity, stability, and exceptionalism. This has started to change, however, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, which have opened a space for more critical histories to be told.

Finally, as someone teaching at a US institution of higher education in the Gulf, I should say something about intellectual exchange and the proliferation of Western branch campuses mentioned by Al-Rasheed, Hanieh, and Vora. Madawi Al-Rasheed expresses concern that Western academic institutions (not just in the Gulf, but also in the West) may be forced through their funding sources to engage in self-censorship, if not the kind of outright censorship that occurred when Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen was denied entry into the United Arab Emirates for a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics this past March. Adam Hanieh questions whether these institutions will reproduce dominant narratives about the Middle East and both Hanieh and Neha Vora raise the specter of their financial motives. It is undeniable that there are restrictions on academic freedom in these places—as there are in the United States and in Western Europe, especially when it comes to untenured faculty. Here at NYUAD we are guaranteed academic freedom in the classroom and within the institution more broadly, as long as we do not criticize the ruling families or Islam. Critics of these institutions perceive this as a profound infringement upon academic freedom and knowledge production. On the other hand, my students—Emirati, Filipino, American, and Palestinian—are reading and discussing Yasser Elsheshtawy, Andrew Gardner, Ahmed Kanna, and Neha Vora on structural violence, labor regimes, citizen-foreigner relations, and the politics of race, class, and space in the Gulf. In history classes, such as the ones taught by Pascal Ménoret, students are reading Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mamoun Fandy, Stephen Hertog, Toby Jones, Amelie Le Renard, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Vitalis on resource extraction, corporate capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, political protest, and gender in the Arabian Peninsula. If our collective efforts to "theorize the Arabian Peninsula" take root, it will be in universities like NYUAD where students are eager to engage these analyses. This is only one way, but an important one, of creating a new generation of critical scholars and also of developing spaces of inquiry in which "local" scholarship is given serious attention within "Western" universities.

(5) Some argue that the Arab Uprisings changed the ways in which the Middle East can and will be studied. What has been the immediate impact of the Arab uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula and what are likely to be the long-term effects?

The immediate impact of the uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula has been an increased attention to both the transnational reverberations of these events and their antecedents—the politics of sectarianism in and across Arabian Peninsula states, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the peninsula, the impact of social media transnationally, etc. Another result seems to be a renewed attention to various modes of sovereignty—state, popular, cultural—and its contestations. What may and hopefully will emerge with this, then, is the more thorough replacement of the Orientalist notion of "Gulf" states and societies as monolitihic and monochrome sites with a "thicker" understanding of the richness and complexities that underpins each Arabian Peninsula state individually and in relation to one another. To paraphrase Sheila Carapico, it should now become increasingly obvious that the entire Arabian Peninsula "is good for ethnography"—or, more importantly, that it deserves and requires a broader group of scholars’ critical attention.

 


Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
electronic roundtable contributions:

Thinking Globally About Arabia by Toby C. Jones.

Knowledge in the Time of Oil by Madawi Al-Rasheed.

Capital and Labor in Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In by Adam Hanieh.

Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption by Neha Vora.

Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia by Nathalie Peutz. 

Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place by John Willis.

Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian Peninsula by Ahmed Kanna.