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communities and the growth of mistrust and fears often linked with class and economic

interests as well.

In all, the volumes should be of immense interest not only to academics but topolicy makers and third parties involved in the Cyprus peace process, and the

interested public at large.

MARIA HADJIPAVLOU

University of Cyprus

Lisa Wedeen,  Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2008. 320 pp.  d40.00 (hbk).

Almost a decade after Yemen’s unification in 1990, an international conference on

‘emerging democracies’ was held in San’a, reflecting a new agenda in a country

surrounded by autocracies. Unification was an experiment in democratic politics and

nation-state building, both of which have been exposed to severe challenges. Peripheral 

Visions  asks how national attachments are forged in a ‘weak’ state capable of neither

containing violence nor providing adequate services. Rather than focusing on party

politics and electoral contestations, this thought-provoking book explores the making

of democrats where procedural democracy may be embryonic or absent.

One of its key arguments is that ‘quotidian practices of deliberation’, which

complement elections, constitute democracy. Its aim is ‘not to romanticize public sphere

activities, but to deromanticize the ballot box’ (p. 112). Furthermore, the book insiststhat national solidarities are not made once and for all. Rather than foreclosing their

formation, the author argues, the Yemeni state’s failure to inculcate national values and

to act like a state continuously rather than intermittently helps to precipitate establishing

those solidarities. The author makes a strong case for an analysis of politics as

performative. By reason of being context-dependent, ‘performatives’ are a product of 

‘iterative social conventions’ (p. 215) which repeatedly evoke specific visions of 

community and, moreover, serve to denaturalise political identifications. Thus, claims

to and experiences of group solidarity can change over time and are fluctuating. This is

illustrated by the case of a serial killer, taken up in chapter two. Exposing the absence of 

state protection, the case generated a shared experience of anxiety, an acute sense of 

moral entitlements and – temporarily – a national community.

Here Wedeen builds on what scholars such as Iris Jean-Klein have called ‘self-

nationalization’ – the process by which the practices of ordinary persons have nationalizing

effects. Placed in an historical perspective, it is noteworthy that in the late 19th century,

when San’a was plagued by robberies and murders and the state failed to provide

protection, its inhabitants established local self-government. Since the author cautions us

not to conflate all communal imaginings with national ones, and identifies the period

following the departure of the Ottomans (from the 1920s onwards) as marking the rise of 

Yemeni nationalism, an analysis of the extent to which ‘civic participation’ in 2000 was

fundamentally different from responses to ‘moral panic’ in previous centuries may have

implications for our understanding of national belonging. In view of the fact that historicalsources have been referring to ‘Yemenis’ for centuries, the link the book establishes between

the making of ‘a Yemeni’ and the making of a ‘national person’ requires further scrutiny.

Chapter three, too, deals with ‘citizenship participation’. Wedeen devotes much attention

to men’s   qat   gatherings which represent everyday political deliberation and one of ‘the

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vigorous forms of non-electoral contestation’ (p. 111). She describes men’s animated

discussions as occasions for collective reflection on issues of authority and responsibility,

serving to establish publics which contribute to nation-building and to instantiatingdemocracy. Taking issue with Habermas’s theory of the ‘public sphere’, she contends that

qat  chew debates are egalitarian and not tied to embourgeoisement, and rarely legitimate

state authority. However, despite the fact that uneducated and low ranking persons are not

prevented from voicing their opinions, they are not always taken seriously by others, who

may decline to engage with them. The author’s ethnographic examples, impressive as they

are, relate only to intellectuals and members of the political establishment.

Chapters four and five examine Islamic movements. The author uses the recent

conflict between self-identified   Zaydis   and the government to critique categorical

essentialism, arguing that categories such as Sunni and Shi’i require historical

contextualisation and fail to demonstrate why political allegiances take the forms

they do. (Surprisingly she proposes that Husayn al-Huthi could not claim tribalaffiliation, given that the Huthi family enjoys full membership of the ‘tribe’ of Marran.)

Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, among others, Wedeen holds that invoking

those labels is tantamount to calling groups into existence and making them legible.

However, no alternative vocabulary is provided and hyphenating labels does little

more than indicating awareness of their problematic. This elegant and important

discussion is strangely at odds with the use of terms such as ‘caste’ which are not

interrogated. The author stresses that ‘commonalities of shared concerns’ (p. 142),

whether political, national or pious (and these categories may fuse), are always

contingent and may be experienced as contradictory by the actors. Following Talal

Asad, Wedeen notes that religious denominations are discursive traditions, and mightoccasionally serve as vehicles for political mobilisation; that this is so is partly the

result of the regime’s divide-and-rule strategies. She infers that the regime’s main-

tenance of disorder has helped to guarantee its survival. This ‘disorder’ is occasionally

translated into coercive control. In her view this control is very limited – one reason

why the state is unsuccessful in ‘acting like a state’. However, this incapacity may be

exaggerated: thousands of people have been detained or killed by the regime since

unification in places such as Aden, Ma’rib and Khawlan bin ‘Amir.

Peripheral Visions provides a highly innovative analysis of the everyday practices of 

political participation which serve to enact democratic personhood. She takes excep-

tional care to define central terms such as ‘state’, ‘nation’, and ‘regime’, and does not

shy away from tackling highly complex and contentious theoretical issues. The

introduction and conclusion discuss those issues extensively, and each chapter has a

useful summary. The book will attract readers beyond specialists on the Arabian

Peninsula, and is likely to appeal alike to political scientists, anthropologists,

historians, and students of Islamic movements.

GABRIELE VOM BRUCK

School of Oriental and African Studies

Lee Ann Fujii.   Killing Neighbours: Webs of Violence in Rwanda.   Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2009. 224 pp.  d18.00 (pbk).

Lee Ann Fujii analyzes the Rwandan genocide at the level of the community, asking

how do ordinary people come to commit mass violence against their own neighbours,

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198 Book Reviews