The last missing fence in the desert: The Saudi‐Yemeni boundary

Abstract

Alone within Arabia, the eastern three‐quarters of the international land boundary between Saudi Arabia and Yemen remains to be delimited. The Riyadh and San'a governments have been engaged intermittently in bilateral negotiations towards settling the region's last indeterminate territorial limit since the summer of 1992. These consultations have also focused upon the short existing stretch of the boundary between the two states along the Red Sea margins ‐ a border regulated by the most unusual Arabian international boundary agreement signed to date in international law. Historically, a multitude of overlapping claims have been made on south Arabian territory, by Britain ‐ colonial power in Aden until 1967 ‐ and Saudi Arabia. The last year has been notable for the first ever articulation of a mappable claim to the disputed borderlands by a San'a government; its effect has been to at least double the overlap of contemporary territorial claims within southern Arabia. This article documents the twentieth‐cen...