Abstract:

Recent popular uprisings in Arab countries have brought Yemen into the limelight again from the one-sided image of a playground of al-Qa’ida and the Americans. While in most Arab countries the revolutions came as a surprise, in the southern part of Yemen a popular uprising had been cooking under the surface since 2007  to gain a momentum during the spring of revolutions and to continue growing ever since.

Most of social science scholarship on the Arab uprisings focuses on authoritarian regimes and physical and virtual expressions of protest and draws on a regional comparison. In this presentation, Susanne Dahlgren suggests to move out from the Arab regional arena to contextualize the Yemeni revolutions, the youth revolution in north of the country and the pro-independence revolution in the south to the background of historical movement of ideas, things and people that lead as far as to Singapore.

Yemeni unification in 1990 brought together two states with different pasts, and, as Dahlgren argues, roads to modernity. While North Yemen until its anti-Imamate revolution in 1962 was largely a closed country, for centuries South Yemen formed part of trade routes in-between Africa, Asia and Europe and since 1839, hosted a British crown colony. These different historical legacies affect even todaymuch to the way people in the two Yemens vision themselves as part of the world. As unity turned out to be a failure to the South, a clear majority of the people have joined in what is called the “Peaceful revolution” to regain independence. Dahlgren’s ethnographically informed paper looks at the specific Yemeni – northern and southern – legacies that influence this ongoing revolution.