Event

Speaker: Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Hobart and William Smith College. Stacey received her PhD from Penn. 

Title: We're One, But We're Not the Same: Solidarity, Difference, and Opposition(s) in Yemen

Abstract: 
Yemen’s political transition has been a transnational affair from the outset; crafted by people outside of Yemen, supervised via institutions outside of Yemen, it has been resisted and critiqued by networks and alliances of actors that link a varied and widely dispersed Yemeni diaspora.  Poor implementation of the agreement, particularly surrounding the planned National Dialogue, has contributed to governance failures that deepen a number of crises in various parts of the country, and yet these weaknesses have been produced by features of the transitional framework itself.

The primary aims of this article are three-fold: first, it will work to unpack the processes of misrecognition at the international level that produced a transitional framework resisted by many of Yemen’s revolutionary activists. Second, it will map the ways in which revolutionary solidarities forged through collective action both relied upon and have been critical of the country's formal opposition, the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP).  Finally, it will consider some implications of this form of solidarity for the relationship between the JMP and revolutionary activists during the transitional process.  The paper illustrates both the analytic and practical tensions that can be produced by flattening notions of "identity politics" that fail to take account of solidarities that affirm, rather than efface, difference, and considers the role of such solidarities in subaltern, non-statist processes of "peoplemaking."

Lunch will be served.