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Eight The Islah Party in Yemen Political Opportunities and Coalition Building in a Transitional Polity
- Indiana University Press
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Long before the September 11 attacks, scholars and policymakers sought to understand the motives, objectives, behavior, and ideological bases of Islamist groups, ranging from underground extremist cells to formal political parties working within pluralist systems. One of the central (but often unspoken) assumptions has been that Islamists—actors that seek to apply Islamic law to all spheres of social, political, and economic life—consistently represent radical or revolutionary challenges to existing regimes. Instances where Islamist groups ally themselves with distinctly non-Islamist ruling elites or where regimes actively court Islamists to widen the base of support are less well studied and undertheorized. In transitional polities, such topics become increasingly important as Islamist movements create political parties that interact with other political actors through coalitions and parliamentary politics. Despite this lacuna, these issues can be fruitfully explored through the concepts and insights of social movement theory, particularly notions of coalition building and mobilization within changing political opportunity structures. At the same time, such studies contribute to social movement theory by examining the dynamics of contention as strongly ideological movements transform into formal parties. The Yemeni Islah Group (often called the Islah party) provides a rich case study. The Islah party was formed in 1990 in an effort to take advantage of the new political opportunities that emerged with Yemeni uni¤cation in 1989 and subsequent political liberalization. By 1993, the party had joined the ranks of the ruling coalition government, and within less than a year its rival, the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), was defeated in a brief civil war. In the ¤rst postwar cabinet, an Islah member was appointed ¤rst deputy prime minister 205 Eight The Islah Party in Yemen Political Opportunities and Coalition Building in a Transitional Polity Jillian Schwedler and the number of Islah-controlled ministries increased from six to nine. The defeat of the YSP in 1994 should have marked the rapid ascent of Islah, yet the party’s in®uence diminished a few years later to such an extent that it no longer held a single ministry. By that time, the party had a well-established institutional structure and still enjoyed a close alliance with the ruling elite, but it was a party in decline. Why did the defeat of the YSP mark the decline of the Islah party, when all indications suggested a contrary trajectory? This chapter argues that the Islah party as a formally institutionalized political party was useful to President Salih and the ruling General People’s Congress party (Al-Mu#tammar al-Sha"bi al-"Amm) only within the context of a North-South struggle for political domination. With the YSP virtually defeated, GPC leaders maintained personal ties with prominent Islah leaders, but no longer needed Islah as a third party to offset the potential in®uence and mobilization capacity of the YSP at the polls. In this context, the relative strength of the Islah party witnessed a rapid decline as the broader ¤eld of alliances (not only those between the GPC and Islah) altered the structure of political opportunities. Political Opportunities, Elite Alliances, and Yemeni Uni¤cation Much of the literature on social movements has focused on political opportunity structures: the organization of the broader political system and how it shapes possibilities for mobilization. Key areas of concern regarding political opportunities include the level of state repression, relative openness of the system (including the opportunities for mobilization to take on particular forms), the stability of elite-level alliances, and relations between state and social actors (see, e.g., Seidman 1994; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Della Porta and Diani 1999). Where changes in any of these factors occur, one can expect opportunities for mobilization to change as well. Perhaps one of the most dramatic shifts in the structure of opportunities occurs during political liberalization. If an authoritarian regime decides to initiate a process of limited political liberalization, the new opportunities increase the likelihood that new forms of mobilization will emerge to take advantage of changing political conditions. When opposition groups are permitted to organize and campaign as political parties, for example, it provides political actors with the opportunity to expand their support bases and convey alternative political visions to a wider audience. Similarly, regimes may open the political system by allowing civil society organizations to function freely, therefore changing the structure of the public sphere to allow for an increased level of political debate. In Yemen, political liberalization formally began in 1990 as part of a negotiated uni¤cation of North...