Securitizing knowledge production, then and now

Research in Yemen has been considerably constrained by the decade-long armed conflict, and 2024 marked a particularly perilous turn for researchers in all parts of the country. That said, universities and the researchers who work in them—especially Yemen’s twenty public universities—were already understood to be political prior to this deterioration, given their role in state-formation and the consolidation of power for a range of authorities. This is part of why the insurgent Houthi movement has been eager to regulate the curriculum of the Sana’a University, where prominent faculty critical of the Houthis have not simply been fired or arrested but assassinated.Footnote ² Aden University and Taiz University, as universities in areas of more contested control, have been sites of armed struggle between rival forces, as have other universities across the country. Between 2020 and 2023, there were at least forty-one documented cases of attacks on university campuses across the country.Footnote ³ Universities are inhospitable sites for knowledge production and pose a risk to researchers.

Even in areas that have been under the comparatively steadier control of the internationally recognized government (IRG), public universities are critically underfunded, fueling their politicization by directing researchers to seek private, often opaque, funding.Footnote ⁴ The Ministry of Higher Education and Technical Education operated with a total budget of only 1 million USD for the entire fiscal year of 2023.Footnote ⁵ Although there have been some recent efforts to make use of the space of public universities for donor-funded initiatives, these often bypass the governance institutions of the university itself.Footnote ⁶ This is understandable, but it only further heightens the perception that research funding is political. In this context, the seizure of the American Institute of Yemeni Studies facility by armed agents of the Houthis’ Security and Intelligence Service in January 2025 was not surprising. From the perspective of academic freedom, however, it was a terrible loss.

Since the American Institute of Yemeni Studies (AIYS) opened in 1978, the facility has hosted hundreds of researchers in residence at its hostel in Sana’a and built a library with an unparalleled collection of materials, accessible year-round to local and foreign researchers alike. Most importantly, AIYS has administered a fellowship program for Yemeni and American researchers alike, ensuring continuity of knowledge production on Yemen for nearly fifty years, even as other foreign research centers have withdrawn from the country or moved their operations out of Sana’a. For the Yemeni fellows who have been able to continue accessing the library, attending workshops, and meeting at the facility, the work of the AIYS during the first decade of the current war has been a vital lifeline.Footnote ⁷ Prior to the 2025 application cycle, AIYS generally received over seventy-five applications per year from Yemeni researchers seeking support for work at the postgraduate level. The number for the current application cycle dropped precipitously, amid the Houthis’ crackdown, described below.

As for most Americans who have done field research in Yemen, my own relationship to AIYS predates my first travel to the country. This is because of the role that the organization long played in brokering research access for American researchers by facilitating the process of applying for permits from relevant government authorities. Central to this work in the 1990s and 2000s was the subtle navigation of political redlines, often through literal red ink on draft research proposals. For example, the AIYS resident director sent back the first draft of the permit proposal associated with my dissertation research in 2003, a permit that ultimately took eleven months to secure, struck through with red ink, replacing every reference to “Islamist” with “social conservative.” Although I was discouraged, he explained that this would be the kind of politically palatable adjustment that would allow me to do the work I wanted to do in the wake of a recent assassination that occurred at a meeting hosted by a political party I was proposing to study. These kinds of everyday compromises reflected the resident director’s detailed knowledge of the context, of the specific way in which knowledge was securitized by Yemeni authorities, and of how much the system could and could not flex at a given moment.

Those red lines, however, were not established by Yemeni practices alone. Years later, as the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on certain Palestinian charities, I was told by that same resident director that I could not host a workshop at the AIYS facility if it included some Yemeni interlocutors whom I had interviewed for my forthcoming book, because the US Embassy had expressed reservations about safety of the facility if they were present. No one on the invitation list was listed by the US Treasury Department as having violated sanctions. But some of my known associates, it seems, were known associates of people who had made donations to a sanctioned charity in another country, and this was cited as generating an unspecified risk.

I mention these two stories together because they reinforce the claim that the securitization of knowledge production is not new, but also because they highlight the way in which it is generated internally and externally. The current conflict has intensified the notion that the pursuit of knowledge (as well as the knowledge itself) produces risk, but what has not changed is this interplay between internal and external. If anything, that has gotten worse.

The intensification of these dynamics further reveals the limits of a binary understanding of the conflict in Yemen. If we approach the war as one between the IRG and the Houthis, then how do we make sense of the Saudi attack on the Emirati ship off the coast of Mukalla in December, or the Saudi airstrikes in Dhale in January?Footnote ⁸ These have nothing to do with the Houthis and are entirely about the intracoalition politics of the IRG. But this IRG determines the politics of Yemen’s public universities and the allocation of its higher education budget, and represents Yemen at various research conferences abroad. Much of the risk to researchers from Taiz, a divided city, comes from the everyday risks of crossing checkpoints, but also from the additional risk individuals incur to access infrastructure like electricity or internet connectivity when basic services are continually but unpredictably disrupted by conflict actors. Unpacking the binary framing of the conflict in Yemen and its impact is important, although beyond what I can do systematically in this short essay.

Certainly, the threat to academic freedom that has received the most attention is in areas under the control of the Houthis, and this is with some cause. It comes in the context of a crackdown on civil society initiated in May 2024 that was particularly severe and has not abated. As the US military led a coalition of states in attempting to restore Red Sea navigation, the Houthis sought to consolidate domestic control by alleging that a significant proportion of Yemeni knowledge producers were engaged in espionage.Footnote ⁹ Dozens of researchers (and here I intentionally widen the scope to include people who work outside of university settings for think tanks or civil society organizations, but whose work is fundamentally similar insofar as they work as producers of knowledge about Yemen) have since been arbitrarily detained, disappeared, denied access to counsel or fair trial, subjected to torture, and sentenced to death.Footnote ¹⁰ For months, the quotidian impact on the research community has been profound, as colleagues have been afraid to call or email one another for fear that the wrong contact in someone’s WhatsApp list would become a liability.

Several months before the crackdown, members of the AIYS board discussed the desire to start digitizing the collection, but it had become impossible to bring professional equipment into Sana’a by that point, and if the resident director had done so it only would have further fueled suspicion that she was engaged in something nefarious. Although she was able to leave the facility safely months before it was seized, in the thirteen months that the Houthis have held the AIYS facility itself the collection has likely been looted or severely damaged. The mediator who initially attempted to negotiate the resident director’s return, and later to safeguard the facility’s contents, withdrew entirely once US airstrikes on Sana’a and Hodeidah began in March 2025. With the hope that the organization may be able to continue offering the fellowships, the AIYS has reopened, albeit without its library, in Aden.

The AIYS library itself has one of the best collections (if not the best) of English-language research materials on Yemen in the world and is particularly rich in research ephemera (working papers and policy reports) that do not exist elsewhere publicly and may never have been published online. Working in the AIYS library as a graduate student was an amazing opportunity, and I cannot easily convey the magnitude of its loss. But lost it very likely is. The AIYS fellowship programs, the library, and the academic freedom that they support—genuinely freer than anything that exists at any university in Yemen currently or in the past—have been jointly undone by the violence of the Houthis and the bureaucratic assault on crucial sources of funding. Although the elimination of fellowships may not operate through the same mechanism of fear, the effect will similarly contribute to a narrowing of what is known about Yemen, and who knows it.

Freedom around the edges

Yemeni researchers who have left the country are broadly dispersed, now working in universities and in non-university research settings across the MENA region; in European universities; in South, Southeast, and East Asian universities; in Australia; and in North America. Many, although not all, are faced with considerably precarity, both because of the often-temporary nature of their academic positions and because of the terms of their visas. Restrictive immigration policies in some countries, ranging from the outright restrictions on entry in the United States to limits on reunification in Germany and other parts of Europe, have made it very difficult for families to remain together.

Despite these challenges, many Yemeni researchers are finding innovative ways to remain active and are playing a more visible role in international research networks. In part, this is an outgrowth of the normalization of remote participation, as I have seen in my of field of political science. When I became chair of the Middle East and North African politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2021, the section was eager to make use of growing comfort with remote technologies to help overcome barriers to participation that divided members of our research community. Like many associations, we hosted webinars, online workshops, research development groups, and more. As people became more actively engaged online it may have encouraged them to apply to attend or participate in in-person formats, as well. APSA’s 2025 and 2026 MENA workshops have included Yemeni participants for the first time, and the section now has at least three Yemeni members.

However, more serious reckoning with the conditions of transnational Yemeni knowledge production requires consideration of accessible locations. For Yemenis, this means that conferences and workshops in the United States are off the table, as are several Gulf states. I recently co-organized an APSA workshop hosted by the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. It was possible, although not at all easy, for two Yemeni participants to travel to Qatar. This might not have been possible if we had held the workshop in the United Arab Emirates, for example. Academic budgets are contracting, as well, meaning that the ability to host international conferences and workshops is likely to become more challenging for us all.

Transnational collaboration facilitated remotely also enables Yemenis to participate in knowledge production about their country in robust and meaningful ways. In fact, it is ironically one of the few ways in which Yemenis who are geographically divided by conflict can work together, given that international organizations often intentionally hire teams of researchers who are in different parts of the country to contribute to a shared project. This became much more dangerous in 2024, when work of this sort, often in the peace-building or humanitarian sector, was mischaracterized by Houthi authorities as espionage. Restricting this kind of work is a restriction on academic freedom “around the edges”: the academic freedom not of professors or students but of people whom, under other circumstances, we might have counted as our academic colleagues, and whose intellectual freedoms we might have good reason to consider. Their research is not oriented toward scholarly publication, but the knowledge they produce is central to our evolving understanding of their circumstances and our shared world. If I read their work, let alone cite it, I certainly need to consider their circumstances, too, when describing the conditions—and the risks—that shape knowledge production.

A small note of optimism

It is difficult to end with much optimism, but I would like to try. It is thanks to the work of researchers like those described above that I can do so. Working as a consultant with a Yemeni peace-building organization last summer, I learned about counterintuitive developments in one province of Yemen, Marib, that confounded my expectations about internal displacement and the education sector. Marib hosts more internally displaced persons (IDPs) than any other part of Yemen. In the academic literature on Yemen, Marib is also often described as one of the most “traditional” parts of the country, one with a particularly strong tribal system and very conservative gender norms. It has typically had one of the highest gender gaps in literacy. It turns out that when there is a sudden influx of people who have been sending their daughters to school (elsewhere), there is an increase in demand for tertiary schooling. Girls who have completed or are about to complete high school want to attend university. This has had a knock-on effect of generating demand for tertiary school places for the daughters of non-IDP families from Marib and is relatively quickly transforming the governorate’s higher education landscape. What this will mean in three to five years is hard to anticipate.

What is important from the perspective of intellectual freedom is that I did not learn this from peer-reviewed scholarship on Yemen published in academic journals. Nor did I learn it from the Ministry of Education or Marib University itself. I learned about this when working with a team of Yemeni researchers at a peace-building organization on a project funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. They were doing good research on an important question, for which they are likely to be rewarded with suspicion and risk by at least some of their neighbors. This knowledge is not politically neutral, in its intent or in its effect. But it was produced with integrity, and it allowed me to learn.

I appreciate that the Committee on Academic Freedom organized the roundtable panel on academic freedom on which this essay is based, but I would like to gently encourage us to widen our aperture to consider intellectual freedom and ways to work in solidarity with those who do research and produce knowledge on which we all rely.