Yemen's Migrant Networks as Critical Factor in Political Opposition to the Imamate

Abstract

Nineteenth and twentieth century migratory networks had a formative, yet unrecognized, impact in the lead-up to the 1962 establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic. Migrants from Northern Yemen to Aden built discursive spaces for contesting economic and political oppression that served as a foundation for later channels of political dissidents and reformists to oppose the Imamic regime, often walking a tightrope between their own calls for reform and the interests of foreign state actors. Those spaces were preserved in the later development of similar networks after 1962 and paved the way for generations of migrants to contest or advance reigning economic and social orders via labor migration to oil-rich states.