Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi (review)

It is not easy to write a review of Isa Blumi’s new book, Destroying Yemen. It is particularly tricky for a social anthropologist like myself, that is, the representative of a discipline that Blumi uses to lash out against at habitually as harshly.

Blumi’s book begins with the sentence “This was a difficult book” (p. xi), and indeed he seems to have written it in a fit of rage. As a historian, Blumi has presented profound studies on the Ottoman history of Yemen, and Destroying Yemen too takes the current crisis in Yemen as the reference and starting point for his forays into Yemeni history in order to uncover the roots of the country’s conflict. Several other monographs have recently adopted a similar approach, including Helen Lackner’s well-researched and soberly written Yemen in Crisis (reviewed above) and Ginny Hill’s much more journalistic Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia (Hurst, 2017), as well as a few other books with the same focus that are forthcoming.

In Blumi’s case, his venture produced a harsh criticism of globalization, predatory capitalism, neoliberalism, and the boundless forms of military expansionism that Yemen is currently falling victim to. Blumi elaborates how Yemen became the target of foreign policies and interventions that he subsumes under the term “empire”: a highly assertive, but rather elusive coalition of capitalists, neoliberals, and advocates of globalization who aim at integrating Yemen into international markets and financial systems and making Yemen servile to the “needs of certain regional and global interests” (pp. 4–5).

Blumi sees the beginning of this process in the early 20th century, when the imams of the Hamid al-Din dynasty, after the liberation from Ottoman rule, began to adopt a policy of isolation; he considers imam-ic Yemen as “one of the unique cases of indigenous, independent political order to survive World War I” (p. 12). The 1962 revolution and subsequent civil war that led to the abolition of the imamate and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic, are thus interpreted as a “continued foreign effort to subordinate Yemenis, long defiantly independent from the globalization trends infesting the larger world” (p. 5) and to open Yemen to economic development projects “designed to redirect its economy to service global capital’s demands” (p. 12). Being concerned more with the global than with the local, Blumi does not go into the deeper sociopolitical dynamics of the 1962 revolution, which was driven by resentments against the supremacy of the Zaydi sayyid class (who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad) and the tyranny and backwardness of the last imams. According to Blumi’s interpretation, the establishment of the northern Yemen Arab Republic was the beginning of a process that led — since 1978 with the help of the late President ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih and his aides — to the opening of the country and plundering of its resources by the “empire.”

The showdown of this development is the current crisis in Yemen. Blumi argues that during the Salih era, the “empire” had failed to gain full control over Yemen. Now, being confronted with the defiance and obstinacy of the Huthi movement (officially known as Ansar Allah, referred to as the Huthis after founder Husayn Badr al-Din al-Huthi), it came to the conclusion “that the only way to pillage Yemen is now to destroy it” (p. 170). Consequently, Blumi sees the Huthis as the only group in Yemen that has the will and the potential to oppose the foreign plunder of the country and its subordination by the Saudi-led coalition that makes every effort to defeat the Huthis and to make Yemen amenable again to foreign interests.

Blumi’s analysis is — albeit extreme and not convincing in every detail — often highly intriguing. The book literally provides material for controversial discussions on every page. For example, Chapter 6 (“Plundering Yemen and Its Post-Spring Hiatus”) is...