Isa Blumi

The Elephant in the Room: How Outsiders Undermine Yemen's Future

It is in the context of terrible socio-economic and environmental indicators and decades of ineffective government that the entire southern Arabia and Red Sea region threatens to fall into chaos. Crucially, since 2009, two distinct regional conflicts have commanded the attention of the United States as well as regional powers like Saudi Arabia. As a consequence, the regime of 'Ali 'Abdullah Salih has attempted to slander its domestic rivals by associating them with Iran and/or "al-Qaida". Unfortunately, these claims of Iranian or al-Qaida involvement, reiterated in western circles, often distort the nature of instability in the country. Because of a failure of intelligence that the Salih regime exploits, the broader context of the US and Saudi Arabia's strategic concerns in the larger Red Sea region needs to inform how we study the events in Yemen. By recognizing the "Elephants in the Room" we can avoid repeating the analytical shortcomings of the academic and media mainstream and successfully find a long-term solution to Yemen's problems.

Biographical Note:

Isa Blumi (PhD, 2005 NYU), is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Area Studies, University of Leipzig and an associate professor of history at Georgia State University. His work seeks to explain transformations in world history through observations of trans-regional exchanges. Blumi has explored these issues in three recently completed books, all of which initiate a more critical discussion about whether or not historians and social scientists should study the modern Balkans and the Middle East through the prism of ethno-national and sectarian categories. These efforts include Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies series, 2010); Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912 (Palgrave, May 2011); and Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State (Routledge, May 2011). Isa is now embarking on two new projects while a senior research fellow at the Centre for Area Studies: The first challenges the of representations of events over the past year in the larger "Middle East" as extensions of lingering Euro-America power; and the other investigates the interactive dynamics in the nineteenth century South China Sea, Latin America, and Arabia through the prism of Ottoman identity claims.