Chatham HouseVerified account

1. Yemen has become a ‘chaos state’: a place where the central government has lost control of large segments of the territory over which it is nominally sovereign.

2. Yet ‘chaos’ is a relative term: although Yemen indeed appears to be chaotic from the outside, it contains its own internal logic, economies and political ecosystems.

3. The groups that hold the balance of power do not correspond directly to those engaged to date by the UN.

4. Arms and other illicit goods are traded so widely that prices for guns and ammunition have fallen nationwide since the war began.

5. There is ample evidence that key political players and armed actors have benefited considerably from the war economy.

6. As a result, political players lack incentives to agree to a peace process that might threaten the economic status quo.

7. A path to peace? Current policies for peace in Yemen are built around simplistic, binary models of conflict that bear little resemblance to reality. Policymakers need to lend as much weight to ground-up initiatives as to top-down processes.