Competing for Control over the State

Alternative forms of government and statehood exist in the Middle East and North African regions. This edited volume, Rethinking Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa Security, Sovereignty and New Political Orders, offers explorations of the limits of state power in the Middle East and North Africa.

Maria-Louise Clausen has contributed a chapter on Yemen that explore the notion of power from a non-statist perspective, highlighting the limits of states and their governance. In her chapter, Maria-Louise Clausen uses the case of Yemen to argue that the current conflict in Yemen is better understood as a competition over who controls the state, rather than as a conflict between the state and a non-state actor.

Thus, the analysis questions the basic idea of the state as an actor in competition with local or informal actors over power, and instead approaches the state as an arena that provides whoever controls it with access to key resources such as international legitimacy and financial support.