Building on the success of Dr. Sheila Carapico‘s anthology Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf, we are now delighted to share the audio from the very informative discussion she had with Dr. Michael Hudson about Yemen and its neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula, at an event hosted by George Washington University in late April.
The discussion– and indeed, the book itself– is very timely, given that Yemen’s 26 million people are currently experiencing a massive humanitarian crisis as a result of the large-scale military action that the country’s large, rich neighbor Saudi Arabia (and some other Peninsula states) have waged against it since March 2015.
If you weren’t able to get to the GWU event, listening to this podcast can almost “transport” you to the discussion between these two veteran analysts of Yemen’s situation and its very tangled relations with Saudi Arabia.
We were delighted that numerous other experts on Yemen came to and participated in this discussion. You can hear their contributions in the second half of the audio.
Arabia Incognita is published by Just World Books in partnership with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), from whose excellent publication Middle East Report Dr. Carapico culled the dispatches that make up the book. Those dispatches cover, essentially, the whole period since the smaller Arab states lining the Gulf gained their independence from Britain in 1970. They also look at the Peninsula region from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.
In compiling the book,Dr. Carapico also included some helpful introductory and explanatory texts and a number of extremely informative graphics. These include cartoons from razor-sharp Yemeni cartoonistSamer al-Shameeri, a number of maps of Yemen and of the whole Peninsula– and a table that dramatically shows the disparity in GDP per capita between Yemen (to the far right) and all the other states of the Arabian Peninsula.
Just World Books is delighted to make this range of resources available to the public. (Our thanks go to our friends at GWU who made and shared the audio recording.)