Module 4 - Conflict drivers: The rural-urban divide
The Rural-Urban Divide as a Conflict Driver
Abstract
When hearing or reading about the Yemen conflict, the picture one sees tends to be a restricted one. While the majority of people in Yemen live in rural areas, these areas rarely receive a noteworthy amount of attention, especially compared to the major cities. Yet, the rural-urban divide is one of the most important cleavages and drivers in the Yemeni conflict. Some of the main problems for the rural population are certainly poverty, poor infrastructure and the lack of a sufficient health care. However, these factors are all linked to the main root for the huge differences between rural and urban areas that is dependence.
Keywords: rural, cities, inequality, poverty, dependence
Introduction
The video produced by the LSE Middle East Centre offers a brief introduction and overview about the rural-urban divide in Yemen. It stresses the problem of Yemen not being able to feed its own fast growing population and its linkage to agriculture and climate change. The agricultural situation and the country`s economy in general are analysed in terms of the conflict and their influence on rural areas are discussed, as well as the bad infrastructural and health related conditions in many parts of the country.
LSE Middle East Centre: Yemen's Urban-Rural Divide and the Ultra-Localisation of the Civil War, 04/07/2017.
Analysis
With over 70% of the population, the majority of Yemenis live in rural areas. Yet, policy-oriented research and media reporting mostly focuses on the conflict in the major cities [1]. Yemen's rural population accounts for nineteen million people. More than 12 million of them are affected by poverty and food insecurity, with more than 5 million on the point of starvation. The analysis will show that a combination of climate change and war factors have contributed to the rural population's disastrous situation [2].
The living conditions in rural areas have been deteriorating for decades. By the early 2000s, most households depended on men's urban labour in unskilled jobs as their main source of income [3]. Furthermore, climate change led to an increase in droughts and floods, devastating the rain-fed agriculture. In consequence, the country - including its rural population - had to rely heavily on food imports. And due to higher transport costs, food has always been more expensive in the countryside [4]. Despite infrastructural improvements, issues such as poor access to health care and low quality of education persisted in rural Yemen [5].
The transition process after 2011 deteriorated the rural living conditions. It resulted in even fewer work opportunities and lower incomes, so that essential services such as medical care became even less affordable. The main employment opportunity for men is to join military units.[6]
People in rural Yemen remain dependent on purchased food. Since 2015, various air strikes have destroyed rural infrastructure in Yemen, slowing down transport of food and continuously increasing its cost. Many areas are controlled by different groups (mostly tribes) at a time [7]. This can be beneficial to ensure provision for the population, but depending on the number and nature of responsible groups, it may also result in poor coordination and provoke local rivalries.
Most government staff (i.e. people working in the education, health and military/security sector) remain unpaid or receive highly insufficient salaries [8]. The rural-urban divide also has a negative effect on other cleavages that persist in the Yemeni society. In this way, it reinforces gender inequality, with independence and university education being extremely rare for women in rural areas [9].
According to researchers from the LSE Middle East Centre, in the face of "absolute shortages, increased prices and the lack of cash to buy food", out of all Yemenis, the rural poor population is the most prone to die of starvation. Scientists and NGOs stress that people in rural areas are in need of immediate support which should consider the reestablishment of a viable rural economy. [10]
Glossary Entry
For a more detailed explanation of the issues concerning Yemen's rural-ruban divide, we encourage you to take a look at the glossary at the very end of this module. It addresses the root causes, core problems and main effects of the division, while also questioning its role as a cleavage, cause or driver of the civil war. Moreover, you will find useful suggestions for further readings.
Summary and Outlook
This chapter discussed the major aspects of rural-urban inequality in Yemen. It was stressed that poverty, climate change, bad infrastructure and above all socio-economic dependencies fuel the ongoing conflict.
The rural-urban divide is only one of many important conflict cleavages, drivers and causes. See the following four chapters for information about more factors such as gender and religion, some of which are highly intertwined with the rural-urban divide.
Lea Pfeffer, Clara Bettenworth, Justus Nosiadek
Yemen’s Rural-Urban Divide: cleavage, cause or driver of the war?
While Yemen’s overall population has been growing notably for the past decades, the percentage of its rural population has not sunk as significantly as urbanization trends elsewhere would have suggested (IDMC 2019). As of today, about 62% of the Yemeni population live in rural areas (World Bank 2020), more than half of them in poverty (Pournik/Abu-Ismail 2011: 2-3). They heavily rely on agriculture, struggling with living conditions that are worsening since 2011.
Assessing the apparent divide between Yemen’s rural and urban population and its role in the ongoing conflict presupposes a calibration of terms: We hold that this element of Yemen’s social reality is not to be classified either as a cleavage, nor as a key cause or driver of the war. This is based on the general observation that the Yemeni conflict is -undoubtedly- not monocausal, it was not erected upon the rural-urban divide and is highly fragmented. Consistently, inequalities between the country’s rural and urban population are intensified and further complicated by the conflict events since 2015 (and, in fact, before that). We thus define our object of analysis as a “divide”, that is, a line of social division.
Root causes of the Rural-Urban Divide:
Just as the entirety of Yemen’s conflict history is multicausal, so is the Rural-Urban-Divide. Its root causes can be traced back through various decades and generations and they are closely interwoven with each other:
At the very heart of the distinction between rural and urban life in Yemen lie stark economic inequalities and an unequal access to education (Pournik/Abu-Ismail 2011). There are few, if any, local job opportunities for the rural provinces’ young generation, both educational and medical infrastructure are deficient (Lackner 2017). Finally, these imbalances also translate from being an economic to an explicitly political problem: Yemen’s rural population has yet not experienced adequate representation in governance and decision-making procedures, participatory mechanisms are lacking (Pournik/Abu-Ismail 2011: 11-12).
Core problem: multiple dependencies and the war
There are two core problems concerning Yemen’s urban-rural divide, starting with the pre-war decline of rural life due to an increasing dependency on other regions and countries for food imports and workers and ending self-sufficiency in basic staples. While the urban population was just as dependent on imports, the transport of those imports to the remote rural areas led to higher prices for imported products there.
The 2015 outbreak of the Yemeni war deepened those already existing differences in living conditions (even though both urban and rural life has seen continuous worsening since then), so that it is safe to say that the war is the primary cause for the disastrous situation in Yemen in general, and the rural population in particular (Lackner 2017).
A result of the pre-war decline of rural life was the migration of men to towns and cities, working in unskilled jobs to support their families.
With the beginning of the war in 2015, the lack of jobs in rural areas worsened. With 50% of agricultural workers lost, internal displacement highly affected the rural population. Furthermore, internally displaced people in rural areas have worse access to basic services than those in urban areas. This connects to the war on Yemen’ agricultural sector. The latter still represents the main economic factor in rural Yemen.
Targeting economic infrastructure in rural areas and thus destroying food production, storage and transport led to a disturbance of the commodity supply chains, which then caused a rise of food prices by which the rural communities are more adversely affected (Mundy 2017).
The bombings of agricultural land were the most frequent in almost all governorates (Yemen Data Project 2021).
Effects of the Rural-Urban-Division:
The divide between rural and urban areas has multiple negative effects. The core problem (bad living conditions, particularly for the rural population) has led or could lead to malnutrition, starvation and famines (Mundy 2017). Because of the collapsed health-care-system, diseases spread and infants as well as mothers have a lower rate of survival (Pournik/Abu-Ismail 2011). Also, since many men migrate to urban areas instead of working in the agricultural sector which would be needed for self-sustainability, food is insecure too. This then leads to men joining militias in order to earn money to feed their families (Lackner 2017). Overall, the war causes unemployment, poverty, death and trauma for many Yemenis, forcing them to flee or be displaced (LSE MEC/Hill 2017).
Peace negotiations will have to consider the ongoing fragmentation and deal with the decentralisation caused by the phenomena listed above (LSE MEC/Hill 2017).
Public discourse or the lack thereof: Yemen’s rural population is “ignored in an Already-Forgotten War”
What is specifically notable about the rural-urban divide within the Yemeni conflict is the (near) complete lack of media coverage. The country’s rural population, whose uniquely devastating living conditions have already been hinted at above, is, quite simply, “ignored in an Already-Forgotten War” (Lackner 2017). As the Covid-19-pandemic poses a grave threat to Yemen’s countryside provinces with poor infrastructural facilities and as famine once again looms (Human Rights Watch 2021), little to no discursive attention is directed towards these war-torn regions, even though it could possibly generate and incent the humanitarian assistance needed.
Also, scientific research on the topic is alarmingly scarce. Peace and conflict research usually and exclusively focuses on Yemen’s larger cities, on policies affecting the latter and on urban sites of confrontation (LSE MEC/Hill 2017). Given that the country’s rural population has been harmed disproportionately by the conflict events in general, and the destruction of critical infrastructure in particular, future research must acknowledge the Rural-Urban-Divide as a crucial element of the Yemeni conflict. The quest for lasting peace in the region presupposes a compelling narrative by civil society and NGOs which highlights the needs of Yemen’s rural population. Besides that, it calls for a systematic account of the distinct spatial dimensions of war within the scholarly debates of conflict research.
References:
Hayman, Carolyn/ al-Dawsari, Nadwa (2010). ‘Tribes, conflict and rural livelihoods in Yemen’, in: Middle East and North Africa Programme: Meeting Summary, Chatham House Study Group.
https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/Middle%20East/280610mt gsummary.pdf
Human Rights Watch (2021). ‘Yemen: Houthis Risk Civilians’ Health in Covid-19
Stop Spreading Disinformation; Ensure Access to Testing, Health Care, Vaccines’, in: HR Country Reports. Press release, 06/01/2021. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/01/yemen- houthis-risk-civilians-health-covid-19
International Displacement Monitoring Center (2019). ‘Yemen. Urban displacement in a rural society’, in: UnSettlement: Urban displacement in the 21st century, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/201910-urban-yemen%20updated.pdf
Lackner, Helen (2017). ‘Yemen’s Rural Population: Ignored in an Already-Forgotten War’, in: Yemen’s Urban–Rural Divide and the Ultra-Localisation of the Civil War’, #LSEYemen Blog Entry, 06/12/2017. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2017/06/13/yemens-urban-rural-divide- and-the-ultra-localisation-of-the-civil-war/
LSE Middle East Center/Hill, Ginny (2017).Yemen’s Urban–Rural Divide and the Ultra- Localisation of the Civil War. Workshop Proceedings. Conference Paper. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/84177/1/Hill_Yemen%27s%20urban- rural%20divide%20workshop%20proceedings_2017.pdf
Mundy, Martha (2017). ‘Empire of Information: The War on Yemen and its Agricultural Sector’, in: Yemen’s Urban-Rural Divide and the Ultra-Localisation of the Civil War, #LSEYemen Blog Entry, 06/19/2017.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2017/06/19/empire-of-information-the-war-on-yemen-and-its- agricultural-sector/
Pournik, Mohammed/Abu-Ismail (2011). The ADCR 2011: Poverty Dynamics in Yemen as a Representative Arab LDC, United Nations Development Programme Arab Development Challenges Report, Background Paper 2011/1. https://www.undp.org/content/dam/rbas/doc/poverty/BG_13_Poverty%20in%20Yemen.pdf
Yemen Data Project (2021). ‘Airwar Data 2015-2021’, in: Data.
https://yemendataproject.org/data.html
Recommended readings:
For an in-depth inquiry into Yemen’s Rural-Urban Divide, its role within the war and its analytical significance, we recommend the following readings:
- Von Bruck, Gabriele (2017). ‘Saada. Ground Zero’, in: Yemen’s Urban-Rural Divide and the Ultra-Localisation of the Civil War, #LSEYemen Blog Entry, 06/19/2017. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2017/06/19/saada-ground-zero/The author sheds light upon the conflict events within the Saada Governorate, putting them into a larger strategic context and emphasizing the disproportionate destruction of rural livelihoods.
- Höglund, Kristine/Melander, Erik/Sollenberg, Margareta/Sundberg, Ralph (2016). ‘Armed Conflict and Space: Exploring Urban-Rural Patterns of Violence’, in: Björkdahl, Annika/Buckley-Zistel, Susanne (eds). Spatializing Peace and Conflict. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 60-76. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137550484_4The authors present a novel and innovative conceptual imprint, which systematically accounts for the spatial distinctiveness and contextuality of violent conflict events. They differentiate between rural and urban areas and ask for the respective recurrence of specific patterns of violence. This is a timely and necessary advancement for Peace and Conflict Research, since it has -for the most part- been blind to spacial factors of conflict development and corresponding modes of peacebuilding.
Sources and Literature
[1] Lackner: Yemen’s Rural Population: Ignored in an Already-Forgotten War, The London School of Economics and Political Science, June 12th, 2017.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2017/06/12/yemens-rural-population-ignored-in-an-already-forgotten-war/ (last access: 05/09/2021).
[2] Brady: Empowering women in Yemen's civil war, DW News, 25/09/2019, https://www.dw.com/en/empowering-women-in-yemens-civil-war/a-50586064 (last access: 05/09/2021).
[3] LSE Middle East Centre: Yemen's Urban-Rural Divide and the Ultra-Localisation of the Civil War, 04/07/2017, https://youtu.be/mP9RTYTkUXg (last access: 15/09/2021).
[4] Semnani: Yemen. Urban displacement in a rural society, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, October 2019, https://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/201910-urban-yemen_0.pdf (last access: 05/09/2021).
This study explores factors of rural and urban displacement in Yemen. It shows that war and displacement are not primarily an urban phenomenon. Internal displacement mostly takes place within rural or urban areas. The access to basic services is better in urban Yemen. The decline of rural life started pre-war and led to the spread of informal settlements on urban peripheries.
[5] Pournik/Abu-Ismail: The ADCR 2011: Poverty Dynamics in Yemen as a Representative Arab LDC, UNDP, Arab Development Challenges, Background Paper 2011/13, 2011, https://www.undp.org/content/dam/rbas/doc/poverty/BG_13_Poverty%20in%20Yemen.pdf (last access: 05/09/2021).
This paper assesses the situation of socio-economic development in pre-war Yemen. It focuses on the persistence of generalised poverty in rural areas and other, mainly rural issues and trends, such as environmental degradation, gender inequality, poor education and rising unemployment.
[6] LSE Middle East Centre: Yemen's Urban-Rural Divide and the Ultra-Localisation of the Civil War - Workshop Proceedings, July 2017, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/84177/1/Hill_Yemen%27s%20urban-rural%20divide%20workshop%20proceedings_2017.pdf (last access: 05/09/2021).
This report summarises the findings of a workshop held by the LSE Middle East Centre on Yemen's rural-urban cleavage. It analyses economic and political situations throughout the country by focussing on different governorates. While both urban and rural populations suffer from the ongoing war and disrupted supply chains, the outcomes show that rural areas are more adversely affected by the humanitarian crisis.