Introduction

Authoritarian governance in pre-2011 Yemen conformed tomany of the stereotypes about the MENA region, inwhich a dominant president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, leda political party, the General People's Congress,which occupied a central role in political life.Saleh's position depended on a number of stratagems,ranging from co-option of elites and oppositionpolitical figures to external patronage, theco-option and/or penetration of civil society and,when necessary, the wielding of outright repressionagainst political opponents. Saleh lost power in theaftermath of Yemen's 2011 uprising, after which acombination of external actors and domestic elitesfashioned a transitional plan for the reconstructionof Yemeni politics. The fracturing of this elitebargain in the face of popular discontent andregional challenges ultimately led to civil war andexternal intervention in 2015 to prop up the shakypost-Saleh status quo. In post-2015 Yemen, it hasbecome effectively meaningless to talk about theauthoritarian practices of a centralised stateeither in response to opposition or in pursuit ofregime maintenance. Rather, what has developed is afragmented polity in which the power of the centralstate is severely constricted by the emergence ofsignificant sub-state actors (with externalpatronage) and in which the adoption ofauthoritarian forms of control is no longer themonopoly of any single actor, state or non-state.This chapter will review these developments and, inparticular, will examine the question of what itmeans to speak of authoritarian governance in afragmented state in the course of a conflict inwhich the power of the central government iscontested.

Areas of Limited Statehood and HeterarchicalSecurity Orders

The aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings has up-endedaccepted wisdom regarding sovereignty in the MiddleEast. With the exception of Tunisia, regimeschallenged by popular mobilisation responded withviolence against their citizens, leading to amilitarisation of politics and societies. In manyinstances, popular mobilisation led to a breakdownof previously established governing practices andthe fragmentation of the apparatus of the state.Regimes responded by building new authoritarianregimes out of the remains of what had previouslyexisted often with the assistance of transnationalpartners.