In this episode, we continue the conversation with Dr. Stacey Philbrick Yadav, an associate professor of international relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Our discussion in this episode builds on our conversation in the previous episode. In that episode, we talked about her research practice and some of the main findings of her book titled “Yemen in the Shadow of Transition, Pursuing Justice Amid War”, published by Hurst in 2022. In this episode, we continue talking with Stacey to understand conflict and justice in Yemen more broadly.

For more on the Bus of Hope, by Rim Mugahed go to: https://www.yemenpolicy.org/bus-of-hope/

[00:00:06] Dr. Miranda Melcher: Hello and welcome to Just Access. Too many individuals and groups around the world today are denied access to justice. This access is vital for making human rights effective and securing human dignity, especially those in a situation of vulnerability, including women, children, minorities, migrants, or detainees. 

[00:00:24] In this podcast series, we talk to academics, international legal experts and human rights advocates about hot topics in international law. Our goal is to expose and highlight situations of structural injustice and creatively explore possible solutions to these issues aiming to protect and enforce the rights contained in international treaties.

[00:00:44] My name is Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I’m a Senior Legal Fellow at Just Access. In this episode, I continue my conversation with Dr. Stacey Philbrick Yadav. She’s an associate professor of international relations at Hope Art and William Smith Colleges. Our discussion in this episode builds on our conversation in the previous episode. In that episode, we talked about her research practice and some of the main findings of her book titled “Yemen in the Shadow of Transition, Pursuing Justice Amid War”, published by Hearst in 2022. In this episode, we continue talking with Stacey to understand conflict and justice in Yemen more broadly. Hope you enjoy the conversation.

[00:01:30] Dr. Miranda Melcher: I know this is an oversimplification, obviously, but it’s something that I think a lot of us come across in this idea of improving access to justice and raising awareness and understanding how people make sense of things. There’s this false dichotomy of the one hand, kind of traditional ways of getting people to remember things or make sense of things, whether that’s poetry in a particular culture or education and then on the other hand, there’s this idea of, but also social media. And that’s completely changing how people make sense of things and remember things. And of course that’s a deeply false dichotomy, but you are incredibly well placed to explain exactly why that’s a false dichotomy and how in fact we can think about these things more usefully. So I was wondering if you could maybe help us do that?

[00:02:16] Dr. Stacey Yadav: Well, so let me just say one thing about how I do and don’t use social media in the book. I was really careful about that actually. Social media has been absolutely vital to me retaining research relationships and continuing to learn about Yemen in new ways. Absolutely. But I don’t cite it as a source for a lot of reasons, but mostly because some of it has a semi-private character, like Facebook discussions, for example, where you actually need to be connected with people, so then it feels a little exploitative to me to use that as data. But observationally, I can definitely say Social media is an effective way to disseminate some traditional messages and also for those messages to be reworked and challenged and subject to deliberation.

[00:03:06] It has been my experience that Facebook has actually been a more robust space than Twitter in Yemeni activist circles because it has more space for deliberation, you know, and people can actually kick ideas back and forth, again in a semi-closed or semi limited sense. In some ways feels like a digitized pot chew.

[00:03:33] So people who knows stuff about Yemen, know that Yemenis get together, lots of Yemenis, I shouldn’t say all, get together and chew the leaf of the pot plant in the afternoons mostly and that those are incredibly important spaces of shared deliberation. And I’ve written a lot about them and several other political scientists have written about them as spaces of democratic or pro-democratic deliberation, spaces where policy gets made, spaces where conversations have a material impact outside of the pot chew.

[00:04:08] There’s no reason to think that if that’s true of the pot chew, that isn’t also true of a Facebook or an engagement in a mediated space. But mediated spaces are also monitored by authorities, can be sites of disinformation. I think it’s much easier to see how disinformation and misinformation factor into online debates than in-person conversations.

[00:04:40] Dr. Miranda Melcher: So one of the key things in terms of obviously memory, um, today, uh, that you very help make us is that what’s happening now in Yemen, what happened in 2011 in Yemen, um, are not coming We’re not coming out of a vacuum. Um, and if there are a whole lot of people involved today that literally were not alive or were not alive enough to remember things that happened before that, there’s a lot of history in the 1990s in Yemen that is incredibly salient today, um, despite the fact it’s probably not very well known outside of Yemen.

[00:05:16] So in your expert opinion, with your 20 years of research and practice on this, um, new Yemeni state in 1990? Can we understand it the way that it’s sort of written down in Wikipedia and history textbooks, a sort of “New state created!” Ding! Or how can we think of that maybe more accurately in terms of memory, injustice, how society functions?

[00:05:45] Dr. Stacey Yadav: There’s a certain arbitrariness to starting the book with 1990 and I wanna acknowledge that, right? I started the book when the Republic of Yemen came into being as a unified state, or is it theoretically unified state. And it made sense because it’s such an absolutely pivotal point of reference in the conversations that I’ve had with Yemenese over the years.

[00:06:08] The context of the unification it’s front of mind and it’s front of mind in the context of the current disintegration, but it was front of mind in the context of authoritarian consolidation in the 2000s, civil war in the 1990s, so on and so forth. So, I think it has meant different things but 1990 is an important starting point. 

[00:06:31] That said, even though the book starts in 1990s, I actually talk about a few things that happened beforehand because the process of state formation, and I think we can think of state formation as a process, not something that happened on paper, but through the iterative practices of state building and challenges to them, it was the bringing together of two very different states, North and South Yemen, and they were both very different and had some important similarities, which I try to point out in the book. In particular, the Marxist South was never completely Marxist and the capitalist North had lots of state led development. So the economic models were in some ways, in impractical terms, a little bit more integrable, but I think they were more integrable than the political systems and the choice to do unification through democratization, if you will, was instrumentally attractive, had external support as well, was of the moment, so to speak, if you think about what else was changing around the world in 1990, and the various kind of political transitions, but it hobbled the instrumentalism of it in some ways I think hobbled the functioning of the system. And almost from the beginning there was a period of authoritarian consolidation and the specific techniques of that consolidation looked different, but the system became less competitive over each successive round of elections. And I would like to empathize and sometimes I think people do lose sight of the fact that the last parliamentary election in Yemen was in 2003. And I say that people lose sight of that because I look to the contemporary peace building pro process and the effort to engage the parties.

[00:08:10] And I wonder why, because parties, as institutions have performed a lot of functions, but they haven’t really been the functions of representative democracy for almost two decades. So I think that I’m not arguing that the parties should be ignored or are irrelevant to the peace brokering process, but in the uprising, in the aftermath of the uprising, the parties got a sweet deal from the international community, from the brokered transitional agreement, and they’re kind of lined up to do the same thing now. And I think when people outside who don’t follow Yemen closely hear that there are political parties, that they’re organized, that they’ve been in the opposition, et cetera, it conjures a particular image and a particular idea of the relationship those parties have to people that I don’t really see.

[00:09:08] Dr. Miranda Melcher: And I think that that’s true of a number of things in Yemen where kind of the name on paper and the actual experience don’t necessarily match up along with the idea of one understanding outside of Yemen and a different understanding of inside of Yemen. And so in a similar vein the popular committees, that sounds like a particular thing, to what extent are these popular committees filling a vacuum left by the state? Abandoned by the state? Or is this more along the lines: can we understand this more as civil society that is working with the state or is not trying to outcompete the state? Right? Popular committee, whether you’re coming from a sort of Marxist perspective, gives you one idea whether you’re thinking of it as like a civil society organizing thing gives you a different idea and trying to think about that in the context of the functions of the state can be confusing and sort of the same way that you hear political parties and depending on what background you’re from, you might expect different things. So what should we be thinking?

[00:10:34] Dr. Stacey Yadav: So, you know, I don’t think of them as civil society organizations, but I don’t think of them as instruments of the state precisely either. Although I think that former President Hadi in particular, was keen to make it appear as if they were sort of an extension of his policymaking. I think of popular committees as local security providers, and they are one of many different kinds of local security providers that are playing a role in a fragmented conflict. 

[00:11:06] We haven’t talked too much about the actual formal peace brokering framework in Yemen, but it largely addresses the Houthi insurgents and the representatives of the internationally recognized government of Yemen, which is not a realistic portrait of who’s fighting whom in Yemen. It’s a realistic portrait of one of the core antagonists, the Houthi movement, the internationally recognized government of Yemen is not a uniform actor. Full stop. I could just stop there, but I won’t. The Southern Transitional Council is really significant southern secessionist movement and then there are other more locally specific security providers.

[00:11:49] So one of the collaborative projects that I worked on was sponsored by Inter-Peace and they wanted us to map peace building organizations across the country. And we interviewed people with working with more than 350 different organizations in different parts of the country and 13 governors.

[00:12:03] And what we found was that they described at least six different arenas of conflict, like six different combinations of antagonists in different areas. Now, why do I mention this? I mean, first of all, the international peace brokering process doesn’t reckon well with that comfortably. And I have some thoughts about why it’s not able to do that currently.

[00:12:525] But also in any of those groups that I’m calling antagonists are probably describing themselves to at least some constituency as local service providers, as local providers of security. And so if we think about this in the context of the language of state failure, I try to avoid the language of state failure, not least because it presumes that the state used to be something else but I tend to think of this in terms of radical de facto decentralization. And one of the central demands of the political opposition when it was a reasonably coherent political opposition in the 2000s, and it was articulating demands to the government of former President Saleh was for decentralization, like people wanted more decentralization. Well, now there’s a lot of it, and it didn’t happen in the way that people wanted it to happen at all. But it isn’t something that every local community rejects out of hand when they start to envision a future.

[00:13:28] Dr. Miranda Melcher: And so in these, not quite six separate conflicts, but I suppose a complicated Venn diagram of conflicts 

[00:13:37] Dr. Stacey Yadav: Well put.

[00:13:38] Dr. Miranda Melcher: Thank you. To what extent are some of these main actors, if we can think of a few of them at least, having mildly national goals rather than purely local ones, to what extent are they fighting over control of the state or is the manner of decentralization, or the outcome of decentralization, instead the goal?

[00:14:02] Dr. Stacey Yadav: I am not sure. I’m gonna challenge a few parts of the premise of the question,

[00:14:08] Dr. Miranda Melcher: Yes, please! 

[00:14:08] Dr. Stacey Yadav: I’m not sure who you have in mind when you think about actors with national aspirations.

[00:14:14] Dr. Miranda Melcher: So I think that’s a question right there: is the internationally recognized government, which, by the wording of that implies national aspirations, but we already come across a number of ways in which the implied words don’t translate to reality, right? 

[00:14:32] Dr. Stacey Yadav: The closest organization that I can think of having national level aspirations would be the Islah Party and the set of militias that are more or less aligned with it. And militias aligned with Islah have fought with militias aligned with the Southern Transitional Council. And both groups are at least nominally part of the internationally recognized government.

[00:14:56] So this is what I mean when I say it’s not a unitary actor. And other than Islah, I actually really do struggle to think of any organization that has, I guess maybe the Nasserist party also has national political claims, but for the most part, I do see most conflict actors having somewhat localized political aims.

[00:15:26] The Houthis do not appear to intend to try and project power to control the whole of Yemen anymore. 

[00:15:33] Dr. Miranda Melcher: So where, if anywhere, do things like democratic elections fit into how people think of politics now, politics ideally, some sort of future?

[00:15:46] Dr. Stacey Yadav: I think that people do both want to and have some practical experience during the war of having voice in localities. So I think starting at the smallest scale, deliberative and more democratic practices are a possibility. And then the question becomes how that scales up and who tries to kind of capture parts of that process.

[00:16:10] And the political parties have been a defacto part of the conversation, right? Because political parties are part of the internationally recognized government, they have a seat at the table in negotiations and they’re gonna wanna safeguard that. And the only way to safeguard that is to support the idea of there being some kind of democratic elections.

[00:16:29] But, I think the broader, unsettled question of what the shape of the territorial shape of Yemen or plural Yemens will be is still profoundly unsettled. And so it is very difficult to imagine elections in the super near term.

[00:16:46] Dr. Miranda Melcher: So we’ve already spoken about historical memory and senses of injustice. And very much also the idea that there are, as you said, a number of injustices currently happening, ongoing. It’s not something in the past, right? And obviously the language of things like conflict actors and numbers of sets of conflict have some kind of obvious implications for violence, bad things happening to people, right?

[00:17:14] And in a sense when we’re kind of going, hmm, how would elections work? Do any of these actors have national aspirations? That doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture for justice, access to justice anything like that. But one thing we haven’t explicitly mentioned that I’d like to bring in is the dynamic of sectarianism in Yemen, and we’ve kind of touched on it. How do you see that in terms of inhibiting justice, providing maybe to outside eyes unusual avenues for it. How does that fit into this picture?

[00:18:00] Dr. Stacey Yadav: I think the thing to note is that sectarian difference has always been a feature of Yemeni society and sectarian difference doesn’t determine that there will be sectarian conflict. Something has to happen that institutionalizes that difference in some way or heightens its salience in some way.

[00:18:12] And I think that process did happen, we can observe the sectarianization of conflict over time, but it’s possible to imagine it’s, albeit not tomorrow, it is possible to imagine de-institutionalization or de-sectarianising. Does that seem particularly likely? It does not seem particularly likely to me.

[00:18:32] And I will say that I also have done research in Lebanon and seen what happens when sectarian difference gets built into the post-war reconstruction processs in a way that sort of concretizes the sectarian character of conflict for the longer term, even in the post-war. So I am really concerned about the ways in which the sectarianization of conflict is going to become more durable or to endure in any kind of post-conflict setting.

[00:19:01] External actors have played a part in that story. I would argue they’ve played a big part in that story and when I say, I would argue that, I guess I should start with actually Yemenis argue that all the time, right? And people say, oh, it’s Iran is imposing this, and the Saudis are doing that. And this is a, it’s been a part of Yemeni discourse for as long as I’ve been working in Yemen to talk about the role that external actors have played in sectarianising conflict.

[00:19:26] And I think that’s in part because many Yemenis pride themselves on a history of relative pluralism in the religious sphere, and saw that eroding and wanted to understand why that was eroding. But erode it has. And it’s very difficult to envision a return to the way things might have been before that sectarianization.

[00:19:52] But I also am just profoundly aware that people do have plural political and social identities and sect is one of them. And institutions that allow them to operate on the basis of other dimensions of their identity or to form solid bonds of solidarity with people across that difference would be really important, I think, in addressing the harms that Sectarianization has produced. 

[00:20:16] Dr. Miranda Melcher: So I want to ask about maybe a potential institution in that vein that you mentioned earlier in our conversation, the human rights theaters or staging of crimes and justices and sort of imagining ways forward, which have a lot of really interesting potential on a number of levels, right? But is that an institution or type of institution you think has promise going forward? How is it talked about especially now? 

[00:20:46] Dr. Stacey Yadav: I mean, I don’t know that I would raise that to the level of an institution. I think of it as a bit more of a practice than a practice that had a particular moment and may be really relevant in the future again. The thread, I think connecting that to other forms of justice work is that idea of narration and so opportunities are platforms for people to talk about in imagined or fictional terms or in other more documentary forms. I think that’s important, but I don’t think it only serves a sense of sectarianization or justice. Right? I think documentaries can be inflammatory or can advance really narrowly sectarian claims.

[00:21:30] And the same might be true of theater as well. The question is what kind of platforms exist for people to do that work? And I would like to say something about the role of knowledge production and some of these new organizations, particularly several of them, are based in Europe, organizations that are providing some of these platforms. So I’m thinking of the Yemen Policy Center, which is also based in Germany and was co-founded by a German and Yemeni researchers and it has a specific platform for short fiction, where people are working out a lot of these representational issues and documenting harms.

[00:22:11] And one of the things I like to point to is one short story in particular called Bus of Hope, which was written by a woman named Rim Mugahed, who was my collaborator on one of those collaborative research projects that we talked about earlier and she does all kinds of research on the gendered impacts of conflict, the gendered effects of Covid 19 on gender and public policy in Yemen and she’s a sociologist by training, so it, you know, it’s good social science research, but she also writes novels and short stories. And so she wrote this short story about the mobility challenges that women face in and it’s short. I encourage you to read it. I’ll share the link with you and it that they did.

[00:22:57] Yemen Policy Center did like an animated short to go with so it’s an interactive animated short and it’s filled with graphs and data from her researcher life that helps the reader to understand that this fictionalized experience actually represents something that lots of women deal with and, you know, lays out some potential forms of everyday solidarity that could improve the living conditions for women with the profound mobility limitations that they face in Sinai right now. So one of the encouraging things for me is that, that in the Arabic version, it’s available in Arabic and in English, the Arabic version is the most accessed content on their website.

[00:23:39] Dr. Stacey Yadav: Full stop. This is an organization that publishes great policy reports and all kinds of other stuff, but people really wanted to read and interact with that data and that narration. And so I think, you know, more platforms like that allow for the reparative work, the development of what I call in the book transpositional scrutiny, right?

[00:24:04] The ability to look at something from a set of shoes that aren’t yours. And people need more opportunities to do that, to really in practical terms address the kinds of injustices and harms that the war has produced. 

[00:24:16] Dr. Miranda Melcher: We will definitely be contributing to that site traffic cause we will include the link in the notes that go along with the episode. But unfortunately I am going to ask a question that takes us away from such a fabulous, positive example and think about those external actors a bit more.

[00:24:32] We’ve been mentioning them every so often, but I have a few questions about them in more detail. The first is about humanitarian aid, foreign and domestic humanitarian aid. Seems on the face of it, kind of a good thing. Always, right? Helping people. Yay. Great food, water, medical assistance. That’s great!

[00:24:50] The facts on the ground are much less encouraging and much more nuanced. So, how has this been weaponized in Yemen? How much of a trend is this? And what are the problems, particularly around I think foreign humanitarian assistance? 

[00:25:07] Dr. Stacey Yadav: Absolutely it’s been weaponized, but I do wanna say actually that the weaponization of aid is something that does have a longer history. It’s not just a function of this conflict, it’s certainly also not just a function of the conflict in Yemen, but in Yemen it has a longer history. Under President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the humanitarian aid and access for humanitarian aid workers was absolutely a bargaining chip and something that he restricted heavily in the northern province of Sa’dah, where the Houthis movement is based.

[00:25:38] So, that path is part of their history, as a movement, and we see today that the Houthis movement, likewise, politicizes access and all conflict actors to some extent are essentially either requisitioning for themselves or imposing what we might call tariffs on the movement and distribution of aid materials. And it is making the work of aid workers really much harder. 

[00:26:09] The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, which is a Yemen based think tank and advocacy organization, they did a really excellent, I think, six part analysis of this problem last year, and I encourage people to read it. One of the things that I really appreciated was the framing essay that they wrote, talking about how much they deliberated internally about whether to write this report. Because it weighed upon them very heavily, how much people actually do need the assistance. And so to criticize assistance seems like, you know, not something one should right? And so they really wrestled with it, but felt that the negative externalities that were being produced in the aid environment were too great to risk staying silent.

[00:27:58] But again, not to beat a dead horse, but indigenous knowledge production and research and advocacy work by Yemeni civil actors is part of what brought that to light, what really helped people understand the scope of the problem better.

[00:27:12]  Dr. Miranda Melcher: Another international thing that seems good though obviously there’s a lot of criticality around it is of course the International Criminal Court, which Just Access is quite invested in trying to improve access to and its abilities, and again, on the face of it, there seems some kind of clear ideas of, oh, well what’s happening in Yemen is horrible, therefore, shouldn’t the ICC be involved?

[00:27:35] It’s much more complicated than that. Is there any sense of the ICC as a mechanism for justice as part of the sphere of justice actors?

[00:27:53] Dr. Stacey Yadav: Yes, there is. I would refer people to the organization Mwatana, which is the kind of leading independent human rights organization in Yemen. And just, you know, circling back to the very first thing we talked about, it’s founding director, the daughter of the person I described working closely with and losing early in 2014 or, you know, before the war started.

[00:28:17] So I think the idea of accountability for injustice and accountability for violence is something that certainly directly shaped and influenced her work and the work of Mwatana as an organization and they have an accountability project that is oriented towards legal accountability. 

[00:28:33] My understanding is that there are multiple challenges, but that one of the biggest challenges for legal accountability is that you can really only hold a state actor accountable and that means it’s gonna be a lopsided attempt that doesn’t address the things that the who these or other non-state actors are engaged in. 

[00:28:54] And so I can understand that as a practical limitation. There are still many people who would like to pursue claims against the Saudi led coalition in particular, or their targeting of civilian infrastructure and for some other elements of the aerial campaign in particular. I personally think that legalistic approaches are unlikely to be profitable and look for other forms of post-conflict justice and reparative work, but I know that there are people who are invested in the legal process.

[00:29:31] What happened at the UN Human Rights Council, what, a year and a half ago, I guess, was instructive though, right? Because there was a group of imminent experts that was supposed to do independent human rights monitoring in the context of Yemen, and their mandate was not renewed. And their mandate was not renewed because of documented pressure by the Saudis and the Bahrainis, also members of the Saudi led coalition, to abandon this instrument.

[00:29:57] So, I think to say that documentation is an important part of justice work would be an understatement because documentation I think is necessary for so many different types of both legal and non-legal remedies, and we can see that that’s been securitized, by conflict actors, if we can call the Saudi conflict actors in that sense.

[00:30:19] Dr. Miranda Melcher: Yeah. This is a mildly absurd question to ask, in light of that response. But it is one that we tend to ask all of our guests because it can be easy in some senses to think of the existing routes, right? Oh, well the answer is the ICC. Oh, well the answer is the Red Cross. Oh, well the answer is this existing institution.

[00:30:40] But as you’ve just helpfully explained to us, it’s definitely not that simple. So when you say looking for other remedies, what sorts of things might we think about for improving access to justice in Yemen actually, on a practical would help on the ground level?

[00:30:59] Dr. Stacey Yadav: So I have two things that I have guarded optimism about. There has been some experimentation with reparations in the South, and I’m critical of how that process developed because it began during the transitional process as a parallel justice mechanism outside of the national dialogue. 

[00:31:18] And I think that was a real problem because it did sort of underscore the specialness of one particular group’s claims of injustice. And in, in this case, these were southern military officers who were dismissed from the military unjustly and southerners, whose land had been appropriated unjustly. And, those can clearly be recognized as injustices and yet at the same time, there are people in other parts of the country who had their land appropriated. 

[00:31:47] And the answer is actually a really pragmatic answer, which was to try and keep members of the southern movement engaged with other parts of the transitional process, and to try and keep that process going.

[00:31:58] I think it, I probably can’t get into all the ways that I think the transitional period was misguided, but I will say they were able to pay some reparations. They were able to do some documentation and collection of evidence that could inform some reparative work through reparations, and I think that was a good thing. 

[00:32:19] And it shows that it was doable, at least up to a point. In a chapter of the book that never got published, cause anybody who’s written a book will tell you that there was more to it, right? So one of the reviewers recommended that I cut a comparative chapter that looked at post-conflict justice programs in Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia.

[00:32:40] And one of the things that I learned from the Moroccan and Tunisian examples was about the potential power of reparative development policies that addressed geographically based or sometimes community-based grievances that maybe could be remedied through individual reparations, but might better be addressed through community level reparations.

[00:33:04] And I think we have a clear record in Yemen of the deliberate targeting of certain parts of the country and certain communities in the country for underdevelopment. Development assistance was weaponized in effect against particular populations. That’s a great place to start, right? That would be addressing collective grievances in that way would benefit a lot of people.

[00:33:28]  And so, you know, we talked a little bit before about the normative underpinnings of my book, and the reason that I use the capabilities approach is in part because it’s an approach that recognizes both individual and communal rights. I think thinking of reparations as something that might be owed to individuals, but also to communities would be a good start.

[00:33:49]  Dr. Miranda Melcher: Very interesting. And in fact, quite a useful note to sort of come to a conclusion on. A nice note to end on of guarded optimism. So all that’s left is for me to ask, are there any additional things you want us to know about your book, your future work, what’s happening in Yemen, what we should be looking for, any final words or thoughts for us?

[00:34:11] Yadav Audio: So I’ll be really happy if people read my book, but I also will be really happy if they don’t. And what I mean by that is I’ve written the book in part, the last chapter especially, and my post book work will also address why people need to be reading the growing amount of English language writing about Yemen by Yemenis, right?

[00:34:33] It’s out there. It’s not for the most part being published in peer reviewed academic journals, but academics, students, scholars need to be reading it and citing it. And there isn’t, especially when it’s been published in English, there really is not any reason for an Anglophone global community to continue ignoring it, or otherwise limit it.

[00:34:57] It’s just such an untapped resource. And so I’ve mentioned a bunch of organizations in our conversation today and I’ll send you some links, but I’d be really, I’d be remiss if I didn’t encourage viewers and listeners to really engage with that work. 

[00:35:11] Dr. Miranda Melcher: What a wonderful note to end on. And thank you so much for speaking with us on these episodes.

[00:35:28]  Dr. Stacey Yadav: Thanks.

[00:35:22] Dr. Miranda Melcher: This has been a great conversation and two episodes with Stacy about her work and expertise on Yemen. Stay tuned for future just access interviews and do get in touch with us. If you have any suggestions for people or topics we should cover.