Yemen Politics: "Like Dancing on the Heads of Snakes" | Gregory Johnsen | Big Think

Yemen Politics: "Like Dancing on the Heads of Snakes"

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The Yemen expert describes the major changes he’s witnessed in visiting and studying the country, and the “three layers of crisis” that it confronts today.

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Gregory Johnsen:

Gregory Johnsen, a former Fulbright Fellow in Yemen, is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Johnsen has written for a variety of publications on Yemen including, among others, Foreign Policy, The American Interest, The Independent, The Boston Globe, and The National. He is the co-founder of Waq al-Waq: Islam and Insurgency in Yemen Blog. In 2009, he was a member of the USAID's conflict assessment team for Yemen.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What specific areas of Middle Eastern and Yemeni life do you study?

Gregory Johnsen: Certainly. I can tell a little bit about my background. That might be helpful. I first went to the Middle East as a study abroad student in my junior year and I studied at the American University of Cairo. Then after graduation I joined the Peace Corps in Jordan and so I was there in 2001, 2002 for about 18 months. We got evacuated before the war in Iraq started. And then I was a Fulbright fellow in Yemen in 2003, 2004. Then in 2005 I was a fellow for the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, and I went back to Yemen. In 2006 I led a group of college, university and graduate students to Yemen as part of a State Department program for them to study Arabic. And then this last year I was once again in Yemen in July and August doing some of my own research for an upcoming book.

At the moment I’m working on two separate projects. One is my dissertation at Princeton which everyone’s very eager for me to finish, mostly my advisor and my mom and dad. And that’s on the Yemeni civil war in the north in the 1960’s. And so, what I’m hoping to do is really look at sort of the internal dynamics of the war. There's been a great deal written about this is really through the lens of the Arab cold war talking about Egyptian involvement, Saudi involvement in the war. My hope is to really get at the Yemeni actors themselves. I think in the couple of years of research that I’ve done, I’ve had some great sources and great material.

The second project that I’m working on is much more contemporary and this is to deal with the history of Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Yemeni political history, particularly since unification in 1990.

Question: What changes have you witnessed in Yemen since you first began studying it?

Gregory Johnsen: Right. I think there are a number of changes that Yemen has undergone in the past several years. I first went there in 2003 and this is really very shortly after the September 11th attacks, of course, in 2001 and this is still, at least as I tend it analyze what's happen there in what I like to call the first phase of the war against Al-Qaeda. So, from that point in 2003 to my most recent trip in July and August of 2009, a great deal has changed. The tension within Sana’a is something that I noticed a great deal on my last trip. It was something that even while almost ironically the number of weapons that are being carried within the city of Sana’a has been greatly reduced. The government has done a very good job of attempting to control the small arms that different individuals carry, particularly within in the city limits of Sana’a, not so much outside.

But, while that number has went down, the tensions have actually increased and this is a result, at least in my view, of the civil war that’s going on up in the north in Sa’dah, the resurgent Al-Qaeda threat as well as the increasing - increasingly, I think, violent calls for secession from the south. So, that was something that really, really stood out to me.

Another thing, and this is just by way of anecdote, that one very good Yemeni friend, a journalist who’s I think a very astute observer of Yemeni politics said, was he told me that "I can no longer tell the difference between Al-Qaeda in the mosques and Al-Qaeda in the caves." And I think this is something that should be a great cause for a concern. It was something that I took away from the trip as being very, very worried about. I think this really gets at the idea that Al-Qaeda is putting a message and a narrative out within Yemen that really isn’t being combated at any meaningful level, either by the Yemeni government or by the U.S.

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