The business and investment climate for private sector actors in Yemen has long been challenging. The current conflict has expanded and magnified these changes such that today Yemen is last or near last in a host of global business competitiveness indexes. Many businesses across the country have closed and moved their capital elsewhere, while many of those that remain open…

Yemen is the cemetery of invaders, or so the ancient proverb goes, and today it is certainly the burial ground of foreign military coalitions. In 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) sent their armed forces to lead a regional intervention into Yemen, thinking it would last only weeks.

August saw the Saudi-Emirati military coalition implode as its partners in southern Yemen turned on each other in dramatic fashion. This followed a Houthi strike on a military camp in Aden on August 1 that killed a top southern commander and provided the catalyst for a separatist group's takeover of the city, which is the interim capital of Yemen’s internationally recognized government. 

The reasons the Yemen War began are fundamentally different from why it continues today. All parties to the war – local, regional, and international – have exploited the chaos and collapse of the state to pursue their own vested interests. Among these: powerful actors in the armed Houthi movement have accrued vast sums of wealth through aid diversion and exploiting…

The reasons the Yemen War began are fundamentally different from why it continues today. All parties to the war – local, regional, and international – have exploited the chaos and collapse of the state to pursue their own vested interests. Among these: powerful actors in the armed Houthi movement have accrued vast sums of wealth through aid diversion and exploiting…

The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and Oxford Research Group (ORG) are leading a year-long pilot project to build local capacity for inclusive strategic thinking and dialogue in two of Yemen’s most stable governorates, Marib and Hadramawt. The project rethinks long-held assumptions about the form that the peace process should take. Instead of resorting to top-down centralized frameworks with regards to peace-making efforts, the project seeks to identify otherwise underrepresented parties for inclusion in any renewed and potentially restructured peace…

With the objective of moving towards a resolution of the ongoing conflict in Yemen, the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and Oxford Research Group (ORG) are leading a year-long pilot project to build local capacity for inclusive strategic thinking and dialogue in two of Yemen’s relatively stable regions, Marib and Hadramawt. The project rethinks long-held assumptions about the form that the peace process should take. Instead of resorting to top-down centralized frameworks with regards to peace-making efforts, the project seeks…

Dr. Fawziah Al-Ammar and Hannah Patchett This policy brief sheds light on how the ongoing conflict in Yemen has affected women’s participation in the workforce. It finds that the protracted conflict has, on the one hand, pushed more women into the workforce and new labor markets, in some cases into professions previously dominated by men. While some women have established…

The Yemen conflict is quickly becoming a model for how a non-state actor can effectively employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, as a force equalizer in 21st-century wars. Particularly in 2019, Houthi forces’ deployment of explosive-laden drones on long-range kamikaze missions has allowed them to continually extract costs from their adversaries far beyond the frontlines. In January,…