Yemen at War

This course will offer students a whistlestop tour through key developments in Yemen’s recent history, and how international policymakers, in New York and Washington in particular, responded to these events The course will provide students with a ground-level view of major turning points, and access to the thinking of foreign policy makers during these periods. By the end of the course, we will have come to understand how dominant narratives around countries in crisis and conflict inform high-level policymaking but do not capture the full complexity of the context. We will have challenged our own preconceptions around Yemen and the region; and thought deeply about the difference between critical thinking and motivated reasoning. In the first session of the course, we will distill student’s initial impressions of Yemen and the conflict there into a single document, which we will return to in our final sessions. We will then embark upon a survey of the country’s recent history and key dramatis personae before examining the policy choices made during two important inflection points, with inputs from policy practitioners who worked on Yemen at the time