Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War [Hardcover]

Offers a persuasive rethink of methodologies for true transitional justice in Yemen and for a truly post-conflict state, drawing on history, fieldwork and policy analysis.Responding to a diplomatic stalemate and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, Yemen's civil actors work every day to build peace in fragmented local communities across the country. This book shows how their efforts relate to longstanding justice demands in Yemeni society, and details three decades of alternating elite indifference toward, or strategic engagement with, questions of justice. Exploring the transformative impact of the 2011 uprising and Yemenis' substantive wrestling with questions of justice in the years that followed, leading Yemen scholar Stacey Philbrick Yadav shows how the transitional process was ultimately overtaken by war, and explains why features of the transitional framework nevertheless remain a central reference point for civil actors engaged in peacebuilding today. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, everyday peacebuilding has become a new site for justice work, as an arena in which civil actors enjoy agency and social recognition. Drawing on seventeen years of field research and interviews with civil actors, Yadav positions Yemen's non-combatants not-or not only-as victims of conflict, but as political agents imagining and enacting the justice they wish to see.Stacey Philbrick Yadav is Associate Professor of International Relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and the author ofIslamists and the State. Since 2019, she has been working with Yemeni colleagues on internationally sponsored projects for everyday peacebuilding in Yemen. Remarkable. The only book of its kind on Yemen and its conflict, from one of the world's leading experts. Ambitious, original and reflective, this is a significant advance over existing works on the country and an innovative approach to justice issues in war. -- Jillian Schwedler, Professor of Politic