Yemen’s Defence Structure: Hybridity and Patronage after the State

Abstract Yemen’s defence structure presents a dynamic of “double hybridization”: hybridization due to the overlapping of tribal and military roles and loyalties, and hybridization because of the vague boundaries between formal and informal security actors. Since 2011 onwards, patronage has assumed a sub-state connotation, not a systemic one, occurring in a space of contested authority, beyond the state’s institutional perimeter: patronage develops outside the framework of the central state establishing direct connections between Yemeni local chiefs or warlords and Middle Eastern powers. This new dynamic highlights the deep crisis of the national level, revealing the fracturing of the state and of its formal institutions. Adopting critical security lenses and choosing the defence structure as unit of analysis, this article contends that the army used to rely, before 2011, on informal forces as coup-proofing strategy; since then, however, militias have turned now into the pillar of an emerging defence sector built on composite military alliances. While Yemen’s defence matrixes have changed, their hybridity persists, as, with the collapse of central state institutions, multiple military players have emerged.