Yemen’s competing camps possess enough strength to frustrate each other’s ambitions, but neither has demonstrated the capacity to establish an accepted political order throughout the country. That military impasse makes the search for a consensual settlement unavoidable. The challenge is to move from mutual strategic denial towards institutions and regional guarantees that make peaceful coexistence possible. This requires reconsidering a premise that has long shaped international diplomacy: that restoring a single political authority must precede peace.

This raises a question international diplomacy has largely avoided: must Yemen necessarily remain one centralised state? Territorial integrity is an important principle of international order, while partition can itself generate disputes over borders, resources and political identity. History, however, cannot simply be erased. Until 22 May 1990, two internationally recognised Yemeni states existed—the Yemen Arab Republic in the north and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south—each possessing its own government, army and political institutions.

Unification was therefore a negotiated political project between two sovereign states. Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of unified Yemen, southern leader Ali Salem al-Beidh became vice-president, and a five-member Presidential Council attempted to preserve a rough political balance. Political union, however, proceeded faster than institutional integration, particularly because the two military establishments remained substantially separate. After the political bargain deteriorated, confrontation became civil war in 1994; southern leaders attempted to restore an independent state before Saleh-aligned forces prevailed. Yemen remained one country, but the character of its unity had changed: the negotiated unity of 1990 had become, after 1994, a unity preserved by military victory.

More than three decades later, Yemen is again confronting the question of whether one political centre can........

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