Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68
Asher Orkaby
Abstract
Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. Throughout six years of major conflict Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war. Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egypt’s counterinsurgency, and one of the first large-scale uses of poison ... More
Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. Throughout six years of major conflict Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war. Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egypt’s counterinsurgency, and one of the first large-scale uses of poison gas since World War I. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Rather, during the 1960s Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict whose ensuing chaos tore down the walls of centuries of religious rule and isolation and laid the groundwork for the next half century of Yemeni history. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Egyptian President Nasser’s Arab nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces. The legacy of the eventual northern tribal defeat and the compromised establishment of a weak and decentralized republic are at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.
Keywords:
Yemen,
Egypt,
Saudi Arabia,
Civil War,
Cold War,
Arab Cold War,
Chemical Warfare,
June 1967 War,
Israel,
Philately
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190618445 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190618445.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Asher Orkaby, author
Research Fellow, Department for Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
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