HWS News
18 January 2024 • Faculty Philbrick Yadav on NPR
Professor of International Relations Stacey Philbrick Yadav joins the NPR program “Here and Now” to discuss the recent airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Last week, the U.S. and U.K. targeted Houthi rebels in Yemen in retaliation for recent militant attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. In an interview on NPR’s “Here and Now,” Yemen scholar and Professor of International Relations Stacey Philbrick Yadav discusses the context of the Houthis’ rise to power, their goals, and the regional and international stakes of the conflict.
Philbrick Yadav, who also serves as chair of International Relations at HWS, describes the Houthis’ political aims as “domestic and regional,” fueled by the “internationalized civil war” that’s been underway in Yemen since 2015. “But the conflict really goes back much, much longer than that…. [The] Houthi movement itself dates to 2004. They’ve survived a lot of political changes in the intervening decades and have evolved organizationally and militarily.”
Noting her concerns about escalation in the region, Philbrick Yadav says that while there’s “a real reluctance to engage militarily” by the U.S. and its partners, “the Houthis have vowed that they’ll retaliate and…[their] position as part of a wider network of non-state allies of Iran means that retaliation doesn’t come directly from inside Yemen itself.”
Meanwhile, the conflict in Gaza and the escalation in the Red Sea “plays into the domestic and regional objectives of the Houthis,” she explains. “The conflict in Gaza and solidarity with the Palestinians is something around which Yemenis can easily coalesce.”
Philbrick Yadav, who has conducted field research in Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt, is the author most recently of Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War. Drawing on 17 years of field research and collaboration with Yemeni researchers, the book analyzes the efforts of the country’s civil actors as they try to build peace amid the ongoing civil war, diplomatic stalemate and humanitarian crisis that followed the Arab Spring. Her previous book explores the dynamics of Islamist activism and alliance building. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as The International Journal of Middle East Studies and Middle East Report.
As chair of the Middle East and North African (MENA) Politics section of the American Political Science Association from 2021-23, Philbrick Yadav supported scholars from the MENA region through a Research Development Group and helped advance work to guide the section’s ethics and best practices regarding cross-national research collaboration in the MENA region.
A member of the HWS faculty since 2007, Philbrick Yadav earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from Smith College. In 2008, she was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. For her outstanding scholarship and public engagement on the complex politics of the Middle East, Philbrick Yadav was named the 2018-2019 recipient of the John R. and Florence B. Kinghorn Global Fellowship.
