Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
As Yemen enters its second decade of war, analysis of the everyday provision of education offers a surprisingly useful lens for exploring questions of sovereignty, state-building, and the entrenchment of conflict dynamics. Education occurs under diverse conditions across the country, reflects a variety of material conditions, and advances a range of ideological objectives shaped at the local and regional levels. It both reflects and constitutes the shifting terrain of Yemeni identity. Most importantly, analysis of the education sector suggests that what is being entrenched at the national scale is fragmentation, a set of conflict dynamics produced by a diverse range of Yemeni and international actors that will be progressively more difficult to address. As a traditionally weak state both internationally and internally, Yemen has long been forced into adaptations driven by the preferences of external actors such as Saudi Arabia and the United States. Given that education has often been prescribed by the United Nations and coordinated donors as a part of the peacebuilding toolkit aimed at addressing that fragmentation, it is important to recognize the role that it plays in entrenching the very dynamic it is meant to address.
Erasing Prewar Gains
At the onset of the 2011 Yemeni uprising, population statistics suggest that well over half of the population had no living memory of the time before the 1994 unification of North and South. For those under 21, formal schooling had overwhelmingly been provided by the unified Republic of Yemen’s Ministry of Education. Public schools had an uneven reach and required considerable external development assistance, but they were guided by a common curriculum. By the late 2000s, though it continued to rank at or near the bottom of most regional indicators of educational attainment, the Republic of Yemen had made considerable progress in closing its gender gap in literacy and educational attainment, particularly in urban areas. The generation that rose up to challenge the regime of former President ‘Ali Abdullah Saleh was both better educated and more equally educated than any cohort before it and had for the most part been exposed to the same national narrative in a common curriculum.
To say that the war has undone these gains is not simply or even primarily a humanitarian story; it is also a story of fragmentation and state (re)formation central to the concerns of this collection. The forms of practical political authority emergent in different parts of the country show that bureaucratic entrenchment is possible in the absence of uniform state institutions. Bureaucratic entrenchment can facilitate state-formation or something like it through a mixture of public and private institutions, through donor-led initiatives provided by state and non-state actors alike, at the expense of a shared national curriculum built to create a common identity and cultivate national-level citizenship.
When considered collectively, however, the localized bureaucratic entrenchment occurring in the education sector across the country since 2011 is building conflict dynamics into the politics of everyday life in Yemen on a generational scale.[1] Most significantly, it is doing so in a way that is neither coordinated nor driven by a single actor or shared political imperative. Not only does this pose a short-term barrier to peacebuilding, it will continue to be a challenge for national-level post-war reconstruction, irrespective of changes in the regional context and shifts in donor investment.
This also poses a challenge to prevailing assumptions about Yemen as an arena of proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Proxy discourse has long been criticized by Yemen specialists as unduly reductive, since such interpretations do not capture the multiplicity of actors and motives at play in the conflict and fail to fully account for Yemeni agency. In the immediate context, proxy analysis has also been unable to account for the Houthis’ reluctance to come to Iran’s aid in the US-Israeli-led war, waiting more than a month before making a restrained attack. Nor have they offered a clear account of why the Houthis were willing to reach a bilateral agreement with the United States to limit their Red Sea campaign and refrain from attacking US ships since May 2025. The analysis offered here re-reads the Houthis as one of several relevant actors engaged in a relational field defined largely by the fact of its fragmentation; it is a field in which international partners (including Iran) matter, but not as singularly as proxy analyses would have it. Even something as seemingly mundane as an analysis of the education sector under conflict conditions can shed more light than the blunt Manicheanism of Saudi-Iranian rivalry. There is much more to the “weak” state than its weakness and far more agency than IR theory typically assumes.
Why the Education Sector?
Bureaucratic entrenchment relies on mundane practices of officialdom to embed a particular logic of violence and uphold an associated political order. It contributes to the monopolization of force and can therefore be understood as a component of statebuilding. Bureaucratic entrenchment weaves the logic of violence into the everyday practices by which people navigate their decision-making. This form of entrenchment bears a family resemblance to Wendy Pearlman’s description of semi-normalized fear in Syria, in which the omnipresence of violence helps generate routines and prompts individuals to develop new forms of knowledge needed to navigate the everydayness of their evolving conditions.[2] Like semi-normalization, bureaucratic entrenchment structures individual practice by anchoring everydayness in bureaucratic encounters.
There are several reasons why the education sector is a notable arena through which to explore such entrenchment. For many, schooling is among the most everyday of everyday bureaucratic encounters. At the same time, research shows that logics of violence shape these encounters at different scales, whether individuals describe travel to and from school as a source of physical insecurity, see school administrators as a source of surveillance and fear, or reckon with attacks on school infrastructure itself. Education is also something that is conceptually regarded by Yemenis and by international donor states and organizations as a public good, even though there have long been major gaps in its equitable provision. After significant gains in the 2000s, most recent estimates suggest that the country now resembles the early 1990s on core education indicators.[3] Yemenis across the country have thus experienced the erosion of a core public good on a generational scale.
Going to school is also a foundational encounter with officialdom. To register for school requires some form of identification, with even the most rural schools engaging in some form of record-keeping. This is part of the practice of making oneself (or, more accurately, one’s child) bureaucratically legible. While it would be tempting to say “legible before the state,” given the nature of the argument that I will make below, legible before some sort of authority might be more accurate.
Finally, substantively, education is an engine of ideological transformation that makes it an attractive site of social engineering for a diverse range of actors, both public and private. It provides access to young minds, offers an opportunity to shape narratives of belonging, and is an arena for the extension of surveillance, especially when the space of the home can be difficult to access because of prevailing norms of privacy.[4] Schooling is also a site of technocratic intervention, where putatively apolitical donors seek to address the impact of conflict through humanitarian and peacebuilding programming, framed through the language of “need” and “reach.”[5] While peacebuilding programming often prescribes education as a necessary remedy, it may also contribute to the web of practices that are entrenching conflict fragmentation in Yemen.
Teaching to Entrench in Sana’a
The area of Yemen where the education sector has received the most media and policy attention has undoubtedly been the area under the control of the Houthi movement, or Ansar Allah, concentrated in the Northern highlands, capital region, and extending to the Red Sea and down to the provinces of Taiz and Ibb. While this area does not constitute a territorial majority of Yemen, the bulk of Yemen’s population of 34.9 million people remains concentrated here, along with several of its largest cities.[6] This means that much of Yemen’s school infrastructure has been located in areas under Houthi control for more than a decade.
When the Houthis took control of most of these areas in 2014-2015, they did so in alliance with elements of the former ruling party, the General People’s Congress, and former President ‘Ali Abdullah Saleh.5 GPC loyalists in the bureaucracy maintained their posts, aiding the Houthis’ gradual takeover of existing state institutions across many sectors. While there was a symbolic change at the top with the appointment of Yayha Badr al-Din al-Houthi as Minister of Education in 2016, ideological changes and a purge of school staff were more incremental. The process of gradual change was facilitated by the collapse of public sector salaries when the internationally-recognized government (IRG) relocated Yemen’s Central Bank to Aden. When the Houthis had initially driven the President from the capital in 2015, the CBY continued to work with local governments to disburse salaries to 1.2 million civil servants across different parts of the country.[7] Shifting the CBY to Aden in 2016 effectively withdrew salaries for civil servants – including, critically, teachers – in areas under Houthi control. While some teachers continued to show up to work for months and even years without pay, the system was unsustainable and predictably resulted in resignations across the sector. UNICEF reported that by 2021, there were approximately 171,000 teachers across Yemen who had not been paid salaries since 2016.[8]
In the meantime, the Houthis built a financially-resilient transnational network reliant on a combination of cash, crypto, and hawala transfers.[9] This enabled the group to exercise budgetary power and make new appointments across the education sector based on ideological fealty. The most dramatic ideological changes in the curriculum came in 2021, only after significant staffing changes, when these changes were less likely to be resisted by teachers. It was at this point, for example, that schools eliminated references to the 1962 Revolution that had removed the Zaydi Imamate from power, mandated the chanting of the Houthi sarka in daily assemblies, and introduced openly sectarian content to the curriculum.[10] This was followed in 2023 with changes to the gender-based content on the curricula in areas under Houthi control, which came shortly after the formal introduction of the requirement that women in Houthi-held areas have a mahram to travel, a rule that was widely resisted across segments of urban society, in particular.[11] Curricular changes not only mandated gender segregation but also changed what fields of study are not available to girls and women, the messages in textbooks about the suitable roles of women and girls in society, and the figures associated with socially-appropriate femininity.
The entrenchment of this messaging has also become progressively hegemonic over time, crowding out private educational options by imposing new fees on private school pupils and mandating the integration of elements of the public school curriculum in private institutions.[12] This whole-of-society approach illustrates the importance of staffing as a prior condition of ideological transformation. It shows that there was an incrementalism abetted by the early GPC alliance, the salary crisis, and then restaffing that enabled these curricular changes to take hold. Facing the loss of financial support from Iran, it makes sense that the Houthis have guarded their access to the Red Sea financial networks more carefully since last summer, entering into a bilateral agreement with the Trump Administration and adopting a restrained posture during the current US-Israeli war on Iran. The Houthis will need to foot the bill themselves to maintain their schooling network, but the bureaucratic elements are well in place.
Donor-Led Bureaucratic Entrenchment in Mareb
The situation “next door” in the neighboring governorate of Mareb has differed quite remarkably, though it too has been transformed by the conflict both materially and ideologically. Mareb’s population has grown exponentially as it has absorbed displaced people from throughout northern Yemen, but especially those from the capital region. It is estimated that the population of Mareb governorate grew from approximately 300,000 in 2015 to 1.6 million by 2025.[13] Both quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the displacement crisis matter for residents of Mareb. In contrast to the areas under Houthi rule, following the collapse of Yemen’s budget and retreat of its Central Bank education in Mareb is being provided almost exclusively by international donor-funded programming, though local delivery of programming is often coordinated and provided by Yemeni organizations, many of which are staffed by IDPs themselves.
In the dramatic summer of 2015, as Houthi forces chased IRG-aligned military units and aligned militias southward, the International Organization for Migration identified 14,491 IDPs in Mareb City.[14] At the time, this constituted close to half of the population of the city itself. As Houthi forces were pushed back and battle lines stabilized by 2016, the realities of governance in territories under their control drove even more dramatic and transformational growth in Mareb’s demography. There are some distinct reasons that drove IDPs to Mareb specifically. First is its relative proximity to both the capital district and to the city Taiz – both important centers of civil society and intellectual life where a population with above average levels of education and educational expectations sought ongoing opportunities. Second, it is firmly located outside of the secessionist politics of Yemen’s Southern movement. Added to this was Mareb’s relative stability and food security in the face of a growing food crisis. In 2018, as the Saudi-led coalition supporting Yemen’s internationally-recognized government (IRG) prepared to launch a major campaign on the Houthi-held port of Hodeidah, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator estimated that half of Yemen’s population was at risk of famine.[15] By 2019, the number of IDPs in Mareb had climbed to a staggering 800,000; today, fully 90% of the 1.6 million residents of the region are IDPs.[16]
This unprecedented demographic transformation has included a sharp increase in the number of university educated people, civil servants, teachers, and educated women, in particular.[17] Prior to the conflict, Mareb had a much lower level of girls’ enrollment in school and women’s literacy compared with the urban centers from which IDPs were relocating. By contrast, the capital region had achieved gender parity in secondary enrollment by the end of the 2000s.[18] IDP mothers displaced to Mareb from Sana’a often read and expect to send their daughters to school at much higher rates than the surrounding population. As this demographic reality has intersected with the political institutions in Mareb, it has generated noteworthy effects. Above all, the scope of the IDP crisis has meant that demand for education far exceeds the governorate’s capacity to provide it, and external donors have stepped in to fill the gap. At the same time, local staff of most donor-funded organizations education programs in Mareb are themselves Yemeni and, given the demographic change in the governorate, are often IDPs themselves.
A significant substantive focus of donor-funded education programming is peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and the development of the social requisites of post-conflict recovery. Interviews and focus groups with local CSOs in Mareb suggest that practitioners welcome this support, though they sometimes see the top-down approach of international peacebuilding organizations as failing to recognize key skills and capacities that are already present in Yemeni society. Some are also critical of donor priorities that overemphasize “humanitarianization” at the expense of peacebuilding education, and the way international organizations underestimate the risks that are involved for local organizations engaged in peacebuilding education. The Women, Peace, and Security agenda, moreover, is one that can be locally controversial in Mareb and met with uneven support by CSO practitioners working to implement it as part of curricula.[19] Though INGO-funded education in Mareb does not substantively resemble Houthi-funded education in Sana’a, both systems have become more deeply institutionalized and embedded over the past decade through the mundane practices of daily provision of education to the youngest cohorts of Yemeni citizens.
Conclusion
Putting two very different examples alongside one another is not meant to highlight only difference but also similarity. On the one hand, comparison makes clear something of the very different conditions across the education sector in neighboring parts of Yemen a decade into its protracted civil war. But it also brings to the surface the reciprocal relationship between conflict dynamics, displacement, and service provision. Widening the aperture to include areas of contested jurisdiction like secessionist Aden or divided Taiz, if space allowed, would reveal different particularities that form part of a common story of bureaucratically embedded fragmentation. What the comparison above shows is that the first decade of the war has sorted Yemen’s population in new ways, and that the second decade may be characterized by providing for that newly-distributed population in ways that lock in these conflict dynamics. When the war began in 2015, a majority of Yemeni citizens had no living memory of Yemen before its unification in 1990 as a single republic, however uneasy and incomplete. Going into its second decade of conflict, however, it is instead this entrenched landscape of difference that will mark Yemen the generation to come.
[1] While the Houthis did not take control of Sana’a until 2014, they held significant territorial control beginning in 2011. Struggles over the education sector and clashes over curricula predate this and are part of a wider culture war that pitted salafi evangelists against Zaydi revivalists more for more than two decades. For an account of the politicization of education, including armed clashes and mass expulsions of students, see: Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition, Oxford University Press, 2023, 84-94 and 136-141.
[2] Wendy Pearlman, “Narratives of Fear in Syria,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (2016): 28.
[3] UNICEF, “Yemen MICS-EAGLE Factsheet 2024: Key Education Insights Based on Yemen MICS Data,” October 31, 2024 https://www.unicef.org/yemen/documents/yemen-mics-eagle-factsheet-2024 accessed March 3, 2026 For an account of the campaign against international organizations and impact on data collections in areas under Houthi control, see: Stacey Philbrick Yadav, “Consolidation through Crackdown: Understanding Houthi Rule in Yemen,” Middle East Brief no. 161, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, October 2024 https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-briefs/meb161.html accessed March 4, 2026.
[4] These norms themselves have been overcome, to some extent, by the introduction of a distinct security apparatus, the Zaynabiyyat, designed to surveil women and gender-segmented spaces in which women circulate, including within the home. Raids include teams of security agents in which female Zaynabiyyat separate out women and children for purposes of interrogation and may detain them in separate areas of the home and, eventually, in separate detention facilities.
[5] According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there were over 170 international humanitarian organizations working across 22 governorates in Yemen in 2024. OCHA, “Yemen 2025: Public Dashboards and Tools,” 16 February 2025 https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/yemen/yemen-2025-public-dashboards-and-tools Accessed March 4, 2026.
[6] Saadah had integrated Houthi materials into its curriculum, reportedly as early as 2010. Manal Ghanem, “Curriculum Changes to Mold the Jihadis of Tomorrow,” Yemen Peace Forum, Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, November 5, 2021. https://sanaacenter.org/ypf/curriculum-changes-to-mold-the-jihadis-of-tomorrow/ accessed March 3, 2026.
[7] Mansour Ragheh and Farea al-Muslimi, “Yemen Without a Functioning Central Bank: The Loss of Basic Economic Stabilization and Accelerating Famine,” Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, November 2, 2016, https://sanaacenter.org/publications/main-publications/55 accessed March 4, 2026.
[8] UNICEF, “Education Disrupted: Impact of the Conflict on Children’s Education in Yemen,” July 2021, https://www.unicef.org/yemen/reports/education-disrupted accessed March 4, 2026.
[9] Adam Rousselle, “Cash Flow: Breaking Down the Houthis’ Multibillion Dollar Financial Networks,” Global Network on Extremism and Technology, May 14, 2025, https://gnet-research.org/2025/05/14/cash-flow-breaking-down-the-houthis-multibillion-dollar-financial-networks/ accessed May 4, 2026.
[10] Shaima bin Othman, “A Generation Without a Shared National Identity,” Yemen Policy Center, March 2023, https://www.yemenpolicy.org/a-generation-without-a-shared-national-identity/ accessed March 3, 2026.
[11] “Yemen: Houthis ‘Suffocating women” with requirement for male guardians,” Amnesty International, September 1, 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/yemen-huthis-suffocating-women-with-requirement-for-male-guardians/ accessed May 5, 2026.
[12] Manal Ghanem, “Curriculum Changes to Mold the Jihadis of Tomorrow.”
[13] This is inclusive of both Mareb City and the surrounding governorate. In 2015, the population of the governorate as a whole was estimated at 300,000, and it grew to 800,000 by 2019 as a result of Mareb’s relative stability. ACAPS, “Yemen: Marib District Profile,” Thematic Report, February 19, 2021, https://www.acaps.org/en/countries/archives/detail/yemen-marib-district-profile accessed March 5, 2026. In 2025, Mareb City itself had a population of 1.1 million, with an additional 500,000 relatively concentrated in its near periphery.
[14] Japan International Cooperation Agency, ”Yemen: Country Gender Profile,” March 23, 2009, https://www.jica.go.jp/english/activities/issues/gender/background/n_files/e09yem.pdf accessed March 6, 2026.
[15] “Half the population of Yemen at risk of famine: UN emergency relief chair,” UN News, October 23, 2018, accessed April 1, 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/10/1023962
[16] United Nations High Commission for Refugees, ”Yemen: Marib Field Office: February 2024” March 21, 2024 https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/marib-field-office-site-profile-february-2024-enar accessed March 6, 2026.
[17] ACAPS, ”Yemen: Understanding Conflict and Crisis in the Marib District,” District Profile, November 19 2020, https://www.acaps.org/en/countries/archives/detail/yemen-understanding-conflict-and-crisis-in-the-marib-district accessed March 6, 2026.
[18] Japan International Cooperation Agency, ”Yemen: Country Gender Profile,” March 23, 2009, https://www.jica.go.jp/english/activities/issues/gender/background/n_files/e09yem.pdf accessed March 6, 2026.
[19] I detail some of these criticisms in Chapter 5 of Yemen in the Shadow of Transition, though not in a way that is specific to Mareb. Last spring, I worked on a project that was focused on evaluating progress on the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Mareb and critics routinely emphasized the way that donors redirected curricular resources away from peacebuilding education toward humanitarian aid provision. This project was funded by the UK‘s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office.