Asher Orkaby. Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68.
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/rhy178
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture analysis
ResumoOn the evening of September 25, 1962, as they prepared to depose their ruler, Muhammad al-Badr, to overturn his thousand-year-old imamate, and to establish a new Yemen Arab Republic, soldiers loyal to Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal contemplated their mortality. Fearful they would not survive the following day’s coup attempt, many of the soldiers spent their entire month’s salary on chocolates, which they consumed with resignation. Asher Orkaby’s study Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68, is replete with such humanizing anecdotes, yet it is also a satisfying analytical study of the coup and the six-year war it ignited on the Arabian Peninsula. Orkaby characterizes that conflict as an “internationalized civil war” (3) that was “overrun by foreign interests, interventions, and politics” (7). The tiny and impoverished nation of Yemen, he writes, “became an open field for individuals, organizations, and countries to peddle their agendas in this remote region of South Arabia” (1). This book could not be more timely, as this once obscure corner of the Middle East is again riven by civil conflict and scarred by foreign intervention.
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