This book explains why the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen has embarked on an unexpected path, providing a cogent outline of its venerable and turbulent history and a succinct description of its geography, culture, natural resources, and economy.

This book is a study of the foreign policy of South Yemen, the most radical of Arab states, from the time of its independence from Britain in 1967 until 1987. It covers relations with the west, including the USA, and with the USSR and China, and also highlights South Yemen's conflicts with its neighbours, North Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Oman. The author provides a detailed analysis of the foreign relations of one of the USSR's closest allies in the Third World and shows how conflicts within the country relate to changes in foreign policy. South Yemen has traditionally not been an easy country to study, both because it is so secretive and because the revolutionary regime still arouses such strong passions. Professor Halliday was able to visit the country and to make an outstandingly thorough study of the foreign policy of an Arab state.

Expert analysis of Yemen's social and political crisis, with profound implications for the fate of the Arab World The democratic promise of the 2011 Arab Spring has unraveled in Yemen, triggering a disastrous crisis of civil war, famine, militarization, and governmental collapse with serious implications for the future of the region. Yet as expert political researcher Helen Lackner argues, the catastrophe does not have to continue, and we can hope for and help build a different future in Yemen. Fueled by Arab and Western intervention, the civil war has quickly escalated, resulting in thousands killed and millions close to starvation. Suffering from a collapsed economy, the people of Yemen face a desperate choice between the Huthi rebels on the one side and the internationally recognized government propped up by the Saudi-led coalition and Western arms on the other. In this invaluable analysis, Helen Lackner uncovers the roots of the social and political conflicts that threaten the very survival of the state and its people. Importantly, she argues that we must understand the roots of the current crisis so that we can hope for a different future for Yemen and the Middle East. With a preface exploring the US’s central role in the crisis.

South Yemen: Gateway to the World? tells the story of South Yemen and answers the question could it be a gateway to the world. The book traces the history of the country from the struggle for independence from the British which was gained in 1967. The first part provides an insight into the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen, the first and only socialist state in the Arab world its achievements – the emancipation of women, redistribution of land to the people, an impressive mass literacy programme - and its demise due to internecine struggles in the Yemeni Socialist Party. In 1990 South and North Yemen united but the southerners were discriminated against by the northern regime and in 1994 fought a second war for independence. They were defeated and until the Houthi coup in 2014 were second class citizens in a state which exploited their resources and marginalised their people. Another struggle for independence is now being waged as the southerners cannot live in one state with the fundamentalist Houthi regime which controls more than 80 percent of the north.

A bold firsthand account of one of the persistent Arab uprisings, in Yemen At its beginning in 2007, the Southern Movement in South Yemen was a loose merger of different people, most of them former army personnel and state employees of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) who were forced from their jobs after the war in 1994, only four years after the unification between the PDRY and the Yemen Arab Republic. This bold ethnographic account of a persistent Arab uprising, in a rarely studied corner of the Middle East, explores why the Southern Movement has grown so tremendously during the last decade, and how it developed from a primarily social movement demanding social rights into a mass protest movement claiming independence for a state that had long vanished from the world map. Anne-Linda Amira Augustin asks why so many young people born after 1990 joined the movement and demanded the re-establishment of a state that they had never themselves experienced. At the core of South Yemeni resistance lies the transmission from generation to generation of a dominant counternarrative, which may be seen as the continuation and rehabilitation of the PDRY’s national narrative. This narrative, amplified through everyday communication in families and neighborhoods, but also by media-makers, journalists, school and university teachers, civil society actors, and by the movement’s activists, opposes the national-unity narrative of the Republic of Yemen and intensifies the demands for an independent state.

South Yemen was long a key spot in the strategic geography of the West. Before the Second World War, it was important for the British as an outpost on the way to India. From the mid-1940s it was a crucial gateway to the oil rich Arabian Peninsular and a vital area in the context of superpower rivalry. This book, first published in 1984, traces the development of nationalist sentiment in South Yemen and the emergence of the two main groups in the struggle for independence: the NLF and FLOSY. Analysing both the impact of these groups on Yemeni society and demonstrating how they struggled with each other for supremacy, the book provides an perceptive account of how the revolutionary process in an Arab country unfolded.

This study focuses on South Yemen's attempts to instigate, maintain and defend a revolutionary process in its neighboring regions during 1970–1985. It also analyzes the elites' strategy-making according to their known cultural, social and political inclinations.

This edited volume is an open access title and assembles both the historical consciousness and transformation of the MENA region in various disciplinary and topical facets. At the same time, it aims to go beyond the MENA region, contributing to critical debates on area studies while pointing out transregional and cultural references in a broad and comparative manner.

Fascism, Islamism, Communism -- truth claims, promises of salvation and the unifying force of a common enemy. Radical ideologies may sound very different at first glance, but they do follow similar patterns and make use of similar methods. In Yemen's transition process today, Al-Hirak, a new secessionist movement, is resurrecting symbols of former South Yemen, the only Marxist state in Arabia. Based on a wide range of unpublished documents, this book provides answers to why and how this fundamentally alien ideology was once able to take root in Yemen and for the very first time sheds light on East Germany's vital role in Moscow's socialist state and nation building policy in the Global South.