Twelve Years of Shifting Sands Conflict Mediation with Yemen’S Ḥūthīs (2004-2016)
Forschung Twelve Years of Shifting Sands Conflict Mediation with Yemen’s Ḥūthīs (2004-2016) This article analyses the interplay between conflict and mediation by using the empirical example of Yemen’s Ḥūthī conflict. By reviewing the period from 2004 to 2016, it traces how and why local and national, later regional and international mediation initiatives failed to contain the Ḥūthī crisis Marieke Brandt emen’s history is both splendid – have sabotaged mediated solutions and and troublesome. Historically, “Conflict impeded the restoration of stability in the social, political, sectarian and mediation has a Yemen. tribal cleavages of Yemen’s north- As the Ḥūthī crisis is still expanding, ern regions and the associated conflict long tradition in the paper does not aim at keeping pace Ypotential have periodically undermined with a rapidly unfolding situation. It the country’s stability and led to the Yemen. One of the rather aims at enhancing the reader’s outbreak of major conflicts, including, historical perspective on attempts at most recently, the revolution and civil oldest and most mediation and conflict resolution which war 1962-1970, the civil war of 1994, have taken place between spring 2004 and the Ḥūthī conflict, which erupted famous examples and summer 2016 in Yemen’s north. in 2004 and drove the country into an By contextualising the major local, do- ever-escalating cycle of violence. At the of this tradition mestic, regional, and international me- same time, however, Yemen looks back are the endeavours diation initiatives which accompanied on a long and deep-rooted tradition of the Ḥūthī conflict since its inception, it governmental and tribal conflict media- of Yemen’s first looks for the reasons for the current re- tion that has often prevented the latent grettable, but hopefully not irreversible, and virulent conflicts of this weapon- Zaydi imam.” failure of Yemen’s respected tradition in bristling country from getting out of conflict mediation.
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