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WORK TITLE: Yemen Endures
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NATIONALITY: British
http://www.lse.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/people/ginny-hill * http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/yemen-endures/ * https://pulitzercenter.org/people/ginny-hill * http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2017/08/22/book-review-ginny-hills-yemen-endures/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, policy analyst, and independent consultant. Chatham House Yemen Forum, founder, 2010-13; United Nations Panel of Experts on Yemen, member, 2015-16; London School of Economics, visiting fellow. Formerly worked for Al-Jazeera, BBC, Channel 4 News, CNBC, ITN, and ITV.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Consultant Ginny Hill specializes in the study of the states of the Arabian peninsula. An analyst “with 20 years’ experience in journalism, foreign policy, multi-stakeholder collaboration and political inclusion,” according to a biographical blurb appearing on the London School of Economics website, she writes about the poorest state in Arabia in Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia.
At the time of the publication of Hill’s book, Yemen had been involved in a civil war, in which Saudi Arabia had intervened. Early in 2015 the United States began giving support for the Saudi actions—even actions that caused great hardship for noncombatants. The war against the Houthi insurgency, which had forced Yemeni president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi from power, was fought in part because the Houthis supported al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—and stopping al-Qaeda remained an important American foreign policy goal. “This fascinating portrait of modern Yemen,” stated a reviewer for Hurst Publishers, “vividly reveals the key personalities and events of the last thirty years, and how … Yemen endures.”
Yemen is an anomaly among the Gulf States: poor in the oil resources with which the region is blessed, combined with a lack of water and a rising population, the country is challenged by a government that, for the past quarter of a century, has been more interested in enriching itself than in meeting the needs of its people. “For more than three decades, during the long-running presidency of Ali Abdullah Saleh,” Hill wrote in her introduction to Yemen Endures, “Yemenis learned to function in a system of power that thrived on speculation, denial, and false allegations. Saleh’s decision-making was highly personalized and chaotic, and he deliberately fostered confusion. Saleh’s wily political tactics were so baffling and erratic that even ministers and members of parliament didn’t always entirely understand how things got done—and those who did were reluctant to admit it. Senior officials survived by restricting themselves to their own immediate sphere of influence.” “Saleh is the dominant figure in this bleak drama,” said Ian Black in the London School of Economics Middle East Blog, “subsidising and playing off his rivals and repeatedly fighting the Houthis but then allying with them after he was driven from power in what was supposed to be a ‘controlled transition’ and replaced by Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in 2012 in the wake of the briefly optimistic Yemeni chapter of the Arab Spring. The formal goal of the Saudis, Emiratis and their allies remains to restore Hadi to power.”
Hill’s research was complicated by the habit of Yeminis of concealing the truth from people outside a trusted few. “To understand Yemen,” she wrote in the introduction to Yemen Endures, “you need to be able to hold multiple realities in mind simultaneously, and accept that things are not always quite what they seem. When I moved to Sana’a [the official capital of Yemen] as a freelance reporter in 2006, Yemen was a low-value news country, and I was the only Western correspondent working more or less full-time for British and American media.” She continued: “I conducted several hundred interviews during my research for this book; … however, it reflects my personal opinions. Although I have made considerable efforts to verify my sources’ claims, I cannot be certain that I have eliminated all errors of perception on my part, nor on theirs. As a result, what follows should be treated as informed comment; at the very least, it reveals my sources’ perceptions of the chief protagonists, of each other, and themselves at the time at which we spoke, and this in itself offers an insight of sort into Yemeni politics.” Hill’s “work, more descriptive than theoretical,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “will help explain a seemingly intractable problem to a nonacademic audience.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Hill, Ginny, Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2017, review of Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism, and the Future of Arabia, p. 84.
ONLINE
Hurst Publishers Website, http://www.hurstpublishers.com/ (February 14, 2018), review of Yemen Endures.
London School of Economics Middle East Blog, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (August 22, 2017), Ian Black, review of Yemen Endures.
London School of Economics Website, http://www.lse.ac.uk/ (February 14, 2018), author profile.
Pulitzer Center Website, https://pulitzercenter.org/ (February 14, 2018), author profile.
Ginny Hill
Visiting Fellow
Middle East Centre
Emailginny.uk@gmail.comConnect with me
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About me
Ginny is an independent consultant and policy analyst, with 20 years’ experience in journalism, foreign policy, multi-stakeholder collaboration and political inclusion. She provides strategic advice and training to governments, non-profits and the private sector, with an emphasis on support to policymaking in fragile and conflict-affected environments.
Ginny has covered Yemen for more than a decade as a journalist and policy advisor, and her first book, Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia was published by Hurst in March 2017. In 2010, she founded the Chatham House Yemen Forum, an award-winning global policy consortium, and she recently served on the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen (2015–2016).
A former journalist and filmmaker, Ginny has reported, produced and edited news and current affairs for Al-Jazeera, BBC, Channel 4 News, CNBC, ITN and ITV. She has worked in Bosnia, Djibouti, Gaza, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Somaliland and the US.
Expertise
Yemen
Yemen Endures
Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia
Ginny Hill
‘Ginny Hill is superbly seasoned in Yemen’s physical and political terrain. Her book is a revelation.’ — Jon Snow
Bibliographic Details
Hardback
May 2017 • £25.00
9781849048057 • 320pp
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Description
Why is oil-rich Saudi Arabia involved in a costly and merciless war against neighbouring Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East? Why, with billions of dollars of British and American weapons, have the Saudis lost the upper hand to the Houthi rebels?
In this first authoritative account of the present conflict, Ginny Hill delves into a country still dominated by the pernicious influence of career dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who masterminded patronage networks that kept the state weak, allowing conflict and inequality to flourish. After three decades, he was forced from office by street protests in 2011. In the chaos following his departure, civil war and regional interference plague the country. While the Saudis battle the Houthis—whom they believe are backed by Iran—ISIS, Al-Qaeda and separatist groups compete to exploit the broken state.
This fascinating portrait of modern Yemen vividly reveals the key personalities and events of the last thirty years, and how—despite everything—Yemen endures.
Author
Ginny Hill is a visiting fellow in the Middle East Centre at the LSE who has covered Yemen for more than a decade as a journalist and policy advisor. She founded the Chatham House Yemen Forum and recently served on the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen. Hill has worked for al-Jazeera English, the BBC, Channel 4 News and ITV.
Ginny Hill
Ginny Hill's picture
Ginny Hill is a British freelance journalist, writing and broadcasting on Yemen.
She has reported for the BBC and NPR. Her articles have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analysis.
In 2006, Ginny produced an exclusive film on Somali refugees in Yemen for the UK’s Channel 4 News – the footage was subsequently screened by CNN and featured in an award-winning documentary for France 3.
Ginny has also reported from Somalia, Somaliland and Djibouti.
Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism, and the Future of Arabia
Publishers Weekly. 264.21 (May 22, 2017): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism, and the Future of Arabia
Ginny Hill. Oxford Univ., $29.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-19-084236-9
A careful observer and skilled storyteller, Hill chronicles how the Middle East's poorest nation endured both the 33-year regime of Pres. Ali Abdullah Saleh and the civil war that followed his 2012 departure. Hill, long familiar with Yemen as a freelance journalist and policy consultant, is well situated to cover these events. Protests during the Arab Spring, inspired by the successful ouster Of Tunisia's ruler, morphed in Yemen into a power struggle between various factions within the regime. Hill paints a pessimistic picture of Yemen's future. If the hopes raised by the 2011 uprising for reform and legitimate government are not realized, then the "country will continue to fragment, and careen even further along the road to chaos." The book's principal strength lies in the interviews with politicians, rebels, activists, and foreign diplomats woven throughout the narrative. At times Hill's writing style can be over-the-top: at one point she compares U.S. foreign policy to a "heavy juggernaut tearing down the highway on a dark, rainy night" and Yemen to "just another bit of slow-moving roadkill that was about to get caught in the wheels." Nonetheless, her work, more descriptive than theoretical, will help explain a seemingly intractable problem to a nonacademic audience. (Sept.)
Book Review – Ginny Hill’s ‘Yemen Endures’
by Ian Black
International interest in Yemen has been growing since the current war passed its second anniversary in spring 2017. But the poorest country in the Arab world was wracked by multiple crises long before the Saudi-led intervention. Ginny Hill’s detailed and highly readable account of the background is indispensable to understanding the story so far.
Ginny Hill, Yemen Endures: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia (Hurst Publishers, 2017).
It is not easy to unravel the complexities of Yemen’s weak, patronage-based political system, before, during or since the 33-year-rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the tank driver turned president who proved himself a master of looting, manipulation and survival. Its domestic problems pre-date the unification of 1990 and the civil war of 1994. Dwindling oil reserves, water shortages, soaring population growth, poverty, unemployment, tribal loyalties and a corrupt and incompetent state have been linked for the last quarter of a century.
Yet Yemen, as Hill shows in this fine work of contemporary history, is far more than the sum of its dysfunctional parts: ornate stone tower-houses, fertile terraced landscapes and convivial qat chewing sessions in the local mafraj coexist with dangerously high rates of gun ownership and a generation driven to the edge by a conflict that has left two-thirds of the population needing humanitarian assistance. Air raids, cholera outbreaks, human rights abuses and blockaded ports are the current reality, along with a stalled UN-led peace process and strategic rivalry between the Al Saud and Iran, cheering on the northern Houthi rebels.
Yemen Endures includes an admirably clear explanation of the Houthis, whose Zaydi doctrine, a form of Shiism, is less at odds with the Sunni majority and more a political identity in Sa’ada, the Imamate of old and in modern times, a backward region fighting for power and resources. Hill rightly decries the simplification of sectarian affiliations, arguing that the Houthis, formally named Ansar Allah, enjoyed ‘an enviable degree of legitimacy’ and exploited anti-American sympathy to broaden support after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She dismisses the propaganda that describes Sana’a as the ‘fourth Arab capital’ (after Baghdad, Beirut and Damascus), to ‘fall’ to ‘the Shi’a’, giving a cool assessment of Tehran’s strategy. Yemen’s war, in the words of one observer she quotes, is the flip-side of the 2015 US-orchestrated nuclear deal with Iran – which was bitterly opposed in Riyadh.
Saleh is the dominant figure in this bleak drama, subsidising and playing off his rivals and repeatedly fighting the Houthis but then allying with them after he was driven from power in what was supposed to be a ‘controlled transition’ and replaced by Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in 2012 in the wake of the briefly optimistic Yemeni chapter of the Arab Spring. The formal goal of the Saudis, Emiratis and their allies remains to restore Hadi to power.
Yemen’s internal problems have always been compounded by regional ones, the author argues. Saleh backed Saddam Hussein over the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and triggered the mass expulsion of Yemeni workers from the wealthy Gulf states. Western interest since 9/11 has been driven primarily by counter-terrorism concerns that Saleh supported and simultaneously exploited – backing US drone strikes while (apparently) conniving with jailbreaks by the jihadis of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Barack Obama’s contribution was to authorise the killing of the charismatic American-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was better known for his English sermons than anything in Arabic. The US ‘shadow war’ was run by the Pentagon and aggravated Saleh’s relationship with the tribes.
Alongside the Houthis and AQAP, the southern separatists of the Hiraak movement were the other group challenging what little remains of central government in Sana’a, demanding a greater share of national resources. References to Britain’s long colonial rule in Aden – which ended half a century ago this year – provide useful context. So does the Egyptian intervention in the 1960s, when Nasser lined up with the Republicans against the northern Royalists. Hill cites an unidentified analyst who dreamed up the clever TAPE B formula to explain everything in Yemen: T is for tribes, A for the army, P for political parties, E for extremists and B for business families. Perhaps an F for foreigners (or an S for Saudis) should be added as well?
Yemen Endures is a pacey synthesis of existing research and hundreds of the author’s interviews, many of them anonymous but carefully footnoted – and honestly described as ‘informed comment’. Having worked on and in Yemen for a decade as a journalist, analyst and UN consultant, Ginny Hill is impressive proof that academic rigour, patient and persistent reporting, good contacts and fine writing are not mutually exclusive. Her book is full of vivid insights enriched by far deeper knowledge than can be accumulated during a brief visit by what she calls ‘shock and awe’ foreign correspondents with a strong but short-lived news peg for their stories.