Arguing Justice in Yemen’s Civil War: A Researcher’s Notebook
Abstract
This research project explores the question of how and which stories nations and people
construct about justice in international relations through the case study of the conflict
in Yemen. The war in Yemen has raged since 2015, and is currently considered the world’s
worst humanitarian crisis, with close to 80% of Yemen’s population in need of some
kind of humanitarian aid. On one side of the war is the U.S. backed Saudi-led coalition.
The coalition is composed of more than ten countries, but primarily led and funded
by Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent, the United Arab Emirates. On the other side
of the conflict are the Houthi movement known as Ansar Allah and their Iranian allies.
The war in Yemen bears geopolitical significance beyond the immense scale of human
suffering in the war. It exposes what a complex, modern day proxy war looks like in
the Middle East. It combines several economic factors, including oil and fishing resources,
with purported religious rifts and the regional rivalry of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
In terms of justice, the war in Yemen poses unique problems of social and legal conceptions
of justice in contemporary international relations. I will explore the competing meanings
of justice through interviews with the Yemeni diaspora, and legal justice through
a review of international humanitarian law, and a state conception of justice through
the statements of Saudi Arabia and United States. In essence, this study will explore
Yemeni people’s conceptions of justice, how international law has defined justice
previously, and may define it for Yemen, and how the United States of America and
Saudi Arabia choose to define justice in Yemen. At the end of this project, I synthesize
these three conceptions of justice in Yemen conflict to explore what impact these
differing conceptions will have on a sustainable peace process
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
Asian and Middle Eastern StudiesPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18346Citation
Vadapalli, Amulya (2019). Arguing Justice in Yemen’s Civil War: A Researcher’s Notebook. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18346.Collections
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