Weighing the Tribal Factor in Yemen’s Informal Politics

Abstract

The Yemeni state is weak. To govern, the central government contends with a myriad of competing local and regional powers in a style of government that has been called the politics of patronage, the politics of chaos, the politics of permanent crisis, and dancing on the head of snakes. This chapter argues that if we understand formal politics to be the institutions of government and the public political processes of modern states (political parties and elections), and informal politics to be relationships of power outside those formal institutions, then governance in Yemen is mostly informal. To the consternation of development agencies and modernist state builders, the Yemeni regimes govern Yemen through what might be called an informal policy of managed chaos playing factions against one another, just as the Qajar regime did in the nineteenth century. A centralized but diffuse patronage network pulls all factions towards the personal rule of the president—the state, the economy, political parties, militant groups, influential personalities, and tribes are all elements of the patronage system. Ironically, the Yemeni state promotes informal power rather than formal power. The Yemeni state prefers to be the grand arbiter between many different centers of power in Yemen, pulling and manipulating the myriad factions of Yemeni and tribal society through a centralized but diffuse patronage system. Rather than oppose the sovereignty of the tribe, the central state encourages it, preferring to rule over a myriad of divided small entities than to govern citizens directly.