Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies) 1st Edition
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Chaos in Yemen challenges recent interpretations of Yemen’s complex social, political and economic transformations since unification in 1990. By offering a new perspective to the violence afflicting the larger region, it explains why the ‘Abdullah ‘Ali Salih regime has become the principal beneficiary of these conflicts.
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach, the author offers an alternative understanding of what is creating discord in the Red Sea region by integrating the region’s history to an interpretation of current events. In turn, by refusing to solely link Yemen to the "global struggle against Islamists," this work sheds new light on the issues policy-makers are facing in the larger Middle East. As such, this study offers an alternative perspective to Yemen’s complex domestic affairs that challenge the over-emphasis on the tribe and sectarianism.
Offering an alternative set of approaches to studying societies facing new forms of state authoritarianism, this timely contribution will be of great relevance to students and scholars of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world, Conflict Resolution, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Blumi's Chaos in Yemen brings a fresh perspective to our thinking about the current crises in Yemen and for this alone Chaos is definitely worth a read... Blumi's Chaos in Yemen is an interesting read of contemporary Yemeni history and society, but it is also an important contribution to the ways that we think about Yemen." - Charles Schmitz; Yemen Update, Number 52: 2010
"Isa Blumi’s inquiry into the historical and contemporary dynamics of state–society relations in Yemen could hardly be more timely given scholarly and policy interest in the antecedents of Yemen’s current revolutionary movement...readers certainly stand to benefit from Blumi’s careful historical analysis of the dialect relationships between local, state, and imperial power in the late Ottoman period and from his efforts to put this analysis to use in untangling the dynamics of Salih’s regime today." - Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, N.Y.; International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011)
"[I]t is a scholarly work written by someone who has a full command of the sources, including the Ottoman archives. Many of his footnotes give fascinating additions to what is in the text, and the bibliography will be greatly appreciated by his fellow scholars." - Noel Brehony; The British-Yemeni Society
Isa Blumi’s Chaos in Yemen is a timely addition to the growing literature on Yemen’s modern history and the historical process of Yemeni state formation. John M. Willis, University of Colorado, USA, Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula
About the Author
Isa Blumi, Assistant Professor at Georgia State University’s History Department and Middle East Institute, is author of numerous articles on the modern Middle East’s history that focus especially on late imperial rivalries in the Arabian Gulf and Yemen as well as issues of Muslim identity in the context of modernity. A former Fulbright-Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, SSRC, ACLS, and AIYS fellow, among his publications is the book, Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire (2003) and articles appearing in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Product details
- Publisher : Routledge; 1st edition (April 16, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0415625750
- ISBN-13 : 978-0415625753
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.14 x 0.51 x 9.21 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

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Isa Blumi, Associate Professor at Georgia State University, received his Ph.D. from NYU in 2005, working under the joint program in the History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies departments created in 1996. Writing a comparative history of the complex interactions between imperial authorities and the inhabitants of Ottoman Albania and Yemen, his dissertation, supervised primarily by Zachary Lockman, Fred Cooper, Khaled Fahmy, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, evolved into a project that took Isa nine years to complete. His research took him to national and regional archives in Britain, the US, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Greece, Albania, Kosova, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen. Such obsessive behavior can be partially attributed to the fact that Isa was initially trained in comparative history and political theory at the New School for Social Research, by among others, Talal Asad, Ferenc Feher, Eric Hobsbawm, Charles Tilly and Aristide Zolberg. Under their tutelage, Isa has consistently sought to explain transformations in world history through observations of trans-regional exchanges. Identifying an important function in combining social history, post-colonial theory, with an analysis of state institutions as they evolved over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Isa argues for a more integrated and inter-disciplinary approach to studying such (ex)changes. His first attempt to lay out some of these methodological issues was in his 2003 book entitled: Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878-1918 (Republished with Gorgias Press, 2010)and in numerous articles on Ottoman Balkan and Yemeni history as well as contemporary Balkan issues.
Isa has continued to explore these issues in three recently completed books, all of which initiate a more critical discussion about whether or not historians should study the modern Balkans and the Middle East through the prism of ethno-national and sectarian categories. Arguing that the misuse of analytical categories has long-term consequences to how current events are understood in the media and by policy makers, Isa remains active in the analysis of the modern Balkans, in particular Kosova and Albania, and has written on contemporary Yemen and Persian/Arab Gulf politics as well. These efforts are most evident in his recent book, Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies series, 2010) where by he highlights the underlying factors that are contributing to the current events in Yemen. By using cases drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries--periods neglected in the scholarship on Yemen--Dr. Blumi has been able to demonstrate how misuse of crude categories of analysis--tribes, sectarian groups--has misplaced the source of conflict in present-day Yemen. His book, slowly drawing the attention of journalists and scholars uncomfortable with the generic explanations offered in the mainstream media and think-tanks, offers the most up-to-date explanation for the current violence in Southern Arabia.
Beyond commenting on, and thus offering a new perspective on contemporary Yemen and the larger Arabian peninsula, Dr. Blumi's new books--Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912 (Palgrave, May 2011), Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State (Routledge, May 2011)and Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 (Bloomsbury, 2013)--reflect his attempts to fuse critical readings of Eurocentric claims to global history with cases drawn from the Ottoman Empire's "peripherial" terroritories in the western Balkans and Arabia. Mobilizing the work of Talal Asad, Frederick Cooper, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and others, these two new books aim to undermine the foundational claims informing how even critical theory loyalists misuse the counter-narrative tools long adopted by post-colonial theorists to challenge western epistomologies. In many ways, these books continue, with actual "case studies" drawn from the late Ottoman Empire, what was started by Spivak, Althusser, Derrida and ultimately Robert Young to undermine the "White Mythologies" that dominate the study of the modern world.
Isa is now embarking on two new projects that explore the interactive dynamics in the nineteenth century South China Sea and Arabia.
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