"Yemen is one of the most outspoken of the Arab countries," Sheila Carapico, a professor at the University of Richmond, said, explaining that Yemeni citizens enjoy relative freedom of speech and of the press.
Carapico, who has lived in Yemen for the purposes of study, argued that important strides have been made in the modernization of the country and in the civil liberties granted to the citizens, but that Yemen remains a nation not quite democratized.
Because Yemen has not yet fully achieved democracy, she said, the government is vulnerable to moving further away from pluralism in the new age of heightened national security measures. The United States has provided "substantial security assistance" to the Yemeni government, Carapico said, concerned about the implications of a more militarized government.
Furthermore, Yemen has publicly expressed support for U.S. presence in Iraq, which is a vastly unpopular move in the eyes of Yemenis. Carapico described the move by the government as political and economic -- when Yemen failed to support the First Gulf War, many nations refused to send them much-needed foreign aid.
Yemen has experienced three major waves of political organization toward democracy in the past century, she explained. The first major wave of civil organization began in the 1950s, she said. This movement was largely composed of socialist-leaning workers, who eventually took over when the British colonists left the country in 1967.
Street protests and union strikes were characteristic of this first popular political movement in Yemen, just as they were around the world at that point in history.
Modernization of public goods and services was the second movement, Carapico said. Although progress had begun in the 1930s, it was very incremental until the 1970s, when the greatest changes occurred.
"Tens of thousands of kilometers of roads were built," as prerequisites for trade, Carapico said. Methods for water collection and distribution were modernized, and connections were made from house to house.
Thousands of schools were built by the cooperation of the government, wealthy benefactors and community members who wanted to improve the educational system of their region.
The third movement toward civic engagement and democracy, Carapico claimed, was the 1990 unification of the northern state of the Yemen Arab Republic -- which had been dominated by the military -- and the southern People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.
The two political groups had publicly agreed to share power of the new nation but fought bitterly internally. The conflict led to a "short, conventional civil war" in 1994, Carapico said.
According to Carapico, more important than the political unification of the country was the impact that the move had on civil society.
Political campaigning occurred in Yemen between more than a dozen prominent parties, and each party published their own newspaper. Political debate became common in Yemen, and the capital city of Sana'a was improved.
Carapico described a "real effervescence of intellectualism" at the national level, while regionally people had become very involved in issues such as ensuring access to water, electricity and education.
Languages of voting and accountability became common concepts, she said, as a majority of citizens -- including women -- became active in politics, she said.
