While it is tempting to conceptualize states as fixed entities possessing hegemonic control over the civic sphere, in twentieth-century Yemen “the state” has been a variable rather than a constant. Three generations of states have ruled parts of Yemen during the past century: a motley mixture of semi-feudal and colonial systems through the 1960s; two republics associated with opposite sides of the cold war during the 1970s and 1980s; and, since May 22 1990, the Republic of Yemen. The civil war of 1994 culminated a hundred years of struggle over the composition and power of the state, and the current government recognizes quite well the limits of is own constitutional, judicial, institutional, and fiscal capacities. Although it commands international diplomatic recognition, membership in the United Nations and other international institutions, military and police forces, a national budget, a civil service, substantial foreign debt, weighty physical infrastructure, and other attributes of state-ness, and although a common national conscious helps bind more than fifteen million Yemenis together, the Republic of Yemen is a new state, still in the process of formation. The gradual, uneven development of the contemporary Yemeni nation-state, sketched in table 2.1, is the timeline against which the variable, dynamic relationship between states and civil society must be viewed.

Civilian state construction is in part a quest for constitutional order and legal hegemony, an effort to centralize judicial practices, co-opt interpretations, and impose the “rule of law.” A diverse, semi-sequential mixture of legal traditions – Ottoman, Zaydī, Shafa'i, British civil and martial, Socialist, Egyptian, various tribal principles, internationally recommended commercial codes – complicates this quest.