Yemen’s history of political conflict is characterized as “civil war” between ontologically distinct communities. Assumptions that these “tribal, regional, and sectarian” divisions operated externally to those structural factors contributing to politics elsewhere in the world have long proven unhelpful for studying Yemen’s modern history. Indeed, during and immediately after the country unified in 1990 and then held open and free elections in 1993, Yemen became an exception in a post-Cold War Middle East. These first round of elections defied normative accounts of political life in the region, an exception that encouraged waves of younger social scientists to come to the country and test out models on democratic capacity building circulating Washington think tanks and policy-maker’s staff meetings at the time.

A war in 1994 between rival claimants to executive authority effectively ended a process of power sharing among MPs representing a broad swath of Yemen’s society. The subsequent concentration of actual power around the regime of Ali Abdullah Salih and his General People’s Congress (GPC) proved dependent on a kind of autocratic politics best practiced by sustaining an approximation of the parliamentarian democracy promised by the 1993 elections. To assure the appearances of a contested democratic system would continue, Salih cooperated with the United States and regional allies to offer some possibilities of inclusion for otherwise rival political parties. Most notably, these opportunities to work within a regime dominated by Salih’s GPC were extended to Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, al-Islah. While the exercise of Salih’s government engaging a weak Islamist faction in a parliament his party controlled attracted some initial interest among scholars, it was only after other parties—Yemen’s Nasserists, South Yemeni socialists, pan-Arabist Ba’athists, and Zaydi reformists—formally entered into an oppositional coalition with the Islamists that Jens Heirbach’s recent book proves necessary.

Heirbach’s astute and meticulous analysis of regime-opposition relations during the last two decades of Salih’s rule offers an especially interesting case to scholars studying cooperation and the complexities of opposition politics within autocratic settings. As Salih’s legitimacy and ability to commandeer external support (especially the US and various Gulf states) relied on assuring the formalities of democracy remained intact (and thus regime legitimacy as Heirbach argues) the regular holding of elections offered Yemenis of wide range of orientations a limited role to play within this democratic façade. One such orientation was the formation of the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), a contentious, conflict-laden coalition that Heibach identifies as a dynamic “institution” of cooperation between regularly adapting constituencies. In this respect, Heibach contributes a unique study of political opposition under otherwise autocratic conditions by producing a history of political opposition to Salih’s “elected” autocratic regime by way of the JMP. Over four chapters, this detailed analysis of the possibilities of cooperation via this JMP challenges scholars to move beyond studying structural factors to account for the dynamic of political contestation that shapes both various opposition actors and the regime in power (along with foreign patrons, I would add).

In answering questions about how and why such cooperation took place in Yemen, Heibach highlights the value of reading human actions through a structuration theoretical model (p. 8). That is, the parties, and thus the nature of political exchange, were informed by human actions that shaped the manner in which these structures contributing to power expansion also facilitated rent seeking for some in the opposition. The emphasis on opposition alliance “performance” helps Heibach introduce a well-conceived and useful case for students of democracy studies and comparative politics because of the details offered about the strategic debates taking place among members of the JMP in times of reaction and adaptation. Whenever Salih’s expansive grab for power led to direct affronts to the democratic institutions on which opposition parties relied, such as banning a party, the targeted actors within the opposition alliance adapted. More importantly, Heibach reveals that the disparate strategies of the opposition cooperative were often informed by the manner in which the Salih regime persecuted some factions while awarded others for agreeing to concessions. This is most revealingly exposed in Heibach’s study of the Islah party.  

While Chapters 1 and 2 account for the conditions under which these rival contingencies found ways to cooperate in the context of actual resistance to Salih’s power, Heibach also highlights the evolution of these alliances by the strategic moves by the regime to violently suppress elements of this opposition while recruit factions from within the Islah party. The close analysis throughout Chapter 3 of how the opposition would struggle to develop new alliances as a response thus marks the key lesson to draw from this fine study. The relative capacity of the (in Juan Linz’s terms) “semi” opposition within the Islah party to interact with Salih’s government induced new kinds of state rule that actually “weakened authoritarianism” as much as the opposition alliance. The problem we face today (and one not directly addressed in Heibach’s book) is the subsequent scramble among those “semi-opposition” actors for the spoils of successfully uprooting the Salih regime by 2011.