The "Yemen Model” as a Failure of Political Imagination

In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen offers an interpretation of the biblical Good Samaritan according to which the Samaritan stops not because he recognizes the need of his neighbor, but because through the act of stopping he enters into a neighborly relation. Practice similarly helped to constitute neighborly relations for Yemeni activists who forged new solidarities through their experiences during the eleven-month uprising of 2011 and its aftermath. Yemeni activists across the political spectrum—from Marxists to Islamists to liberal constitutionalists—have remarked that late nights spent in the squares writing slogans, making posters, and preparing and serving meals fundamentally altered their sense of self in relation to differently situated others. Rather than articulating a single national(ist) project, however, many activists speak of solidarities made in difference, or what political philosopher Iris Marion Young described as "a relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together, for one another.” These solidarities resulted in new and concrete forms of activism, which the formal transitional process has severely undermined. The experiences of Yemeni activists stand as an important reminder to scholars to attend to the intersection of formal and informal in our analysis of the politics of the Arab uprising

Islamist parliamentary politics and the remaking of democracy: Hizballah and Islah in comparative perspective

This dissertation examines the ways in which commitment to the state—treated as a measure of Islamist moderation within the literature on democratic transitions—can be made through appeals to the non-state. Examining the generative binaries of institutions/discourse and structure/agency, the dissertation details the development of two Islamist political parties, Hizballah in Lebanon and the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah), and suggests that each bolsters state legitimacy, through appeals to transnational and subnational sites of authority. This is often misrecognized in large part because the imagining of a strong, national state as the telos of democratization has required scholars to interpret appeals to transnational and subnational sites of authority, such as religion, tribe, class, sect, or region as anti-state. Detailed case-studies of these two parties suggest that such a telos leads scholars to dismiss these alternative sites of authority as productive of attachment to the state, while also overlooking struggles to mediate between such sites. As Islamists engage their interlocutors along transnational and subnational axes, they help to define (and redefine) the national and, through this, the nature and scope of state legitimacy and what it means to be democratic. The first part of the dissertation thus examines the dialectical relationship between institutions and discourse, detailing the ways in which institutions shape what can be meaningfully said, and how discourse calls new institutions into being. The second section argues that engagement with institutions does not occur along an even playing field, detailing some of the most pitched discursive battles in which these two Islamist parties have engaged. Whether excommunicative discourse (takfir) or allegation of treason (takhwin), each discursive struggle has enabled and constrained what can be meaningfully and profitably said in moments of symbolic exchange. This dissertation is thus situated in a literature that too often attributes singular significance to either institutions or discourse, and endeavors instead to offer a dialectic account that accords analytical primacy to neither