Yemen

Yemen occupies the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula and contains some of the oldest documented urban civilisations in Arabia. From roughly the early first millennium BCE, a succession of South Arabian kingdoms grew wealthy on the overland incense trade and on sophisticated irrigation works, the most famous being the Great Dam of Marib. The kingdom of Saba, traditionally associated with the biblical Sheba, was the most prominent of these, alongside Maïn, Qataban, Awsan, and Hadhramaut. By the late third century CE the Himyarite kingdom had absorbed its rivals and dominated the region until the sixth century, when Aksumite Ethiopian and then Sasanian Persian intervention brought Himyarite rule to an end.

Islam reached Yemen during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, and the territory was subsequently administered as a province of the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates. As central caliphal authority weakened, local dynasties emerged, including the Ziyadids, the Yu'firids, the Sulayhids, and, most enduringly, the Zaydi Shia imamate founded in the northern highlands in 897, which in various forms persisted into the twentieth century. The Rasulid dynasty (1229 to 1454), based in Taiz, presided over a notable cultural and economic flowering, while the port of Mocha later became famous as an early hub of the global coffee trade. The Ottomans occupied parts of Yemen in the sixteenth century and again from 1849, though the Zaydi imams retained or recovered effective control of much of the highlands.

Modern Yemen's political map was shaped by the divergence of north and south. The British seized the port of Aden in 1839 and gradually extended a protectorate over the surrounding sultanates and emirates, eventually consolidating them into the Aden Colony and the Aden Protectorate. In the north, Imam Yahya of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen secured full independence after the Ottoman withdrawal at the end of the First World War. A republican coup in 1962 toppled the imamate and produced the Yemen Arab Republic, after a long civil war drawing in Egyptian and Saudi support on opposing sides. In the south, an armed nationalist campaign forced British withdrawal in 1967, creating the People's Republic of South Yemen, which by 1970 had become the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only Marxist Leninist state in the Arab world.

The two Yemens, after intermittent border wars and rival unification talks, merged on 22 May 1990 to form the Republic of Yemen, with Sanaa as capital and Ali Abdullah Saleh, previously president of the north, as head of state. A southern secession attempt in 1994 was defeated militarily. The 2011 popular uprising, part of the wider Arab Spring, led to Saleh's resignation in 2012 and a transitional process under Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. From 2014, the Houthi movement, drawn from Zaydi communities in the north, seized Sanaa and much of the country, prompting a Saudi led military intervention in 2015 and a prolonged civil war with severe humanitarian consequences. A United Nations brokered truce in 2022 produced a fragile de facto ceasefire, while authority on the internationally recognised side passed to a Presidential Leadership Council based in Aden.

Yemen is constitutionally a unitary presidential republic with a bicameral legislature, although effective governance remains divided between the internationally recognised authorities and the Houthi administration in Sanaa, a split reflected in the contemporary institutions described in the rest of this dossier.