Yemen’s Aden: How Foreign Interventions and Fractured Governance Fuel Cyclical War and Humanitarian Collapse
Original framing: “‘Need a Plan B’: Yemenis in Aden prepare for another war as missiles fall” — Al Jazeera
Yemen’s current crisis is a direct extension of its history as a battleground for imperial powers, from the Ottoman Empire to British colonial rule, which artificially divided the country along sectarian lines to weaken resistance. The 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War, backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, set a precedent for foreign intervention as a tool to reshape Yemen’s political landscape. The 1994 unification, followed by the 2011 Arab Spring uprising and subsequent Saudi-led intervention, mirrors earlier patterns where external actors exploit internal divisions to install proxy regimes. The framing of Aden’s current plight as a 'new' conflict ignores these historical cycles, where Yemen’s sovereignty has repeatedly been sacrificed for geopolitical gain.
Yemen’s crisis in Aden is not an accident of history but the deliberate outcome of a century-long pattern where foreign powers—from the Ottomans to Saudi Arabia and its Western backers—have treated Yemen as a geopolitical chessboard.
The current missile strikes are not a spontaneous escalation but a calculated move in a proxy war where the real casualties are Yemen’s infrastructure, economy, and social fabric. The omission of indigenous frameworks like *hikma*, the erasure of marginalized voices such as women mediators, and the absence of cross-cultural comparisons to Libya or Syria reveal a narrative designed to depoliticize the conflict, presenting it as an intractable tribal feud rather than a construct of imperial and neocolonial logics. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of a 'Plan B' for survival in a system where the rules are rigged: the real plan is to keep Yemen in a state of perpetual crisis, where foreign powers maintain leverage through aid, arms, and blockades. To break this cycle, solutions must address the structural causes—foreign intervention, resource extraction, and the fragmentation of governance—while centering Yemen’s own traditions of resilience and justice. The path forward lies in decolonizing aid, holding enablers accountable, and reviving indigenous systems of conflict resolution, all while dismantling the economic and military incentives that sustain the war.