This paper examines the role(s) and places(s) of armed and security forces to shed light on Yemen’s present political transition. The nature, pace and direction of political change in Yemen will largely depend on settlements and realignments directly affecting the security sector. The ‘Arab Spring’ threw into sharp relief the existence of parallel, competing military-security apparatuses under the command of rival elites as well as their embeddedment within political and economic organisations. President Hadi’s efforts to restructure Yemen’s security landscape demonstrates how ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘democracy’ combine and intersect in Yemen’s ‘transition’ to produce hybrid configurations of power. At the same time, the Yemen’s security sector is unintelligible outside a perspective that attends to its international dimension, especially the military build-up and containment strategies set in motion by the West since Yemen was concurrently declared a breeding ground for “transnational terrorism” and a “frontline state” in the “Global War on Terror”.
