The two-part hypothesis with which this study began was that civic spaces are defined by political, economic, and cultural factors, and in turn civic activism has discernible (though certainly not determinant) effects on states, material conditions, and popular culture. A particular effort has been made to demonstrate the dynamic, contested, even contradictory elements of this process. The task of this conclusion is to summarize the generalizations that can and cannot be drawn from this study of Yemen about Arab culture, political economy, and civic potential.

Yemen is so far off the beaten path that even Arab or Western Middle East specialists often neglect to visit. To the extent that a conventional wisdom exists about Yemen, however, it is that a combination of Islam and tribalism explains everything. Journalists infer from outward appearances (men wearing skirts and daggers, women in all-encompassing black, aesthetic preferences for indigenous architecture, and the folksy exoticism of the scenery) that something along the lines of the “Islamic conservatism of the traditional tribes of the north” accounts for political outcomes. Conveniently unencumbered by facts about recent history, this shallow cultural determinism does not hold up to close scrutiny. Islamic and tribal law have been used as the antonym for ideal-typical Western modernism by writers from Weber to Huntington, but in an era of post-modern scholarship no serious analysis can result from laying a traditional–modern/primordial–civic heuristic foil sidewise across geography, as though some places are frozen in time while others have history.

Culture is certainly important to understanding the civic life of any polity. In Yemen culture plays a salient role in the sorts of social, intellectual, political, and voluntary activities covered in this study.