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Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring
Author(s) -
Mohammadpour Ahmad
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
middle east policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.177
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1475-4967
pISSN - 1061-1924
DOI - 10.1111/mepo.12349
Subject(s) - citation , spring (device) , history , political science , law , engineering , mechanical engineering
uisites for a sustainable peace. Those who have been excluded from negotiations or who struggle to access international peacebuilding institutions might well understand those requisites differently, and they have relatively little place in Yemen Endures. In fairness, this is likely to be true of any book on the war written under conditions of very limited access, given the Saudi-led blockade and restrictions on the ground in Huthi-controlled territory. Hill ends the book on an unanticipated “positive” note, given the (appropriate) pessimism that pervades her discussion of the failed transitional process and the turn to war. Invoking Christopher Cramer’s Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (Hurst, 2006), Hill seems to adopt the position that “the war itself could turn out to be a more effective catalyst for restructuring the state and the armed forces than [President ‘Abd Rabbuh Mansur] Hadi’s previous top-down efforts” (p. 291). This will strike some readers as an effort to find a shred of good amid the wretched destruction of the threeyear war. But because Hill does not speak at length to the fractionalization of the war itself, the country’s regional breakdown, or the remaking of community that is happening in different parts of the country, it is hard to fully apprehend the possible shape of such restructuring. Hill has given us an excellent sense of why restructuring failed during the transitional period, but as she no doubt understands better than most, if there is no social consensus on how to interpret these failures — as the current war suggests there is not — the path forward is far from clear. Yemen Endures is a well-written work of wide scope on questions of great urgency. It is appropriate for policy-makers, undergraduates, and interested nonprofessional readers; in the case of those with more specialized interest in Yemen, its fit will depend on the reader’s specific interests, but its contributions are many.