The rise of Yemen’s Ansarallah movement (commonly known as the “Houthis”) stands out as one of the most remarkable developments in contemporary Southwest Arabia. Today, Ansarallah stands at a critical juncture – not only reshaping northern Yemen but also extending its reach beyond national borders, capturing global attention, and driving geopolitical shifts. But what does Ansarallah really want – beyond disrupting global shipping routes and launching missiles into the Eastern Mediterranean?

IDEO-YEMEN engages with Ansarallah through its rich ideological output, which communicates its vision to both the Yemeni people and the global public. We offer empirically grounded insights into how Ansarallah ideology shapes – and is shaped by – the social, religious, intellectual, historical, and institutional frameworks it inhabits, and investigate its dual nature as both a normative discourse and an everyday practice. By doing so, we use Ansarallah as a case study to explore ideology’s relational, dynamic, and “agential” nature and generate innovative impulses for the anthropology of ideology.

We pursue three core objectives:

• We provide novel insights into Ansarallah ideology, focusing on its interplay with Yemen’s social, religious, intellectual, historical, and institutional frameworks, including its foreign inspirations, media and ritual expressions.
• We explore ideology’s dual nature as both a normative discourse and lived practice, offering empirically grounded understandings of how ideology evolves through the ongoing exchange with the people.
• We use Ansarallah as a case study to develop an “agential” theoretical framework for the study of ideology within anthropology and related fields.

Our team members focus on synergetic thematic areas to analyse how ideology is constituted, mediated, challenged, and performed. These include:

• The Social and Intellectual Histories of Ansarallah
• Dīn wa-dawla – Religion and State
• Foreign Influences and Inspirations
• (In)Equalities: Gender and “Race”
• Media Expressions and Rituals of Ideology

Projektmitarbeiter:
Siniša Malešević (University College Dublin)
Toby Matthiesen (Bristol University)

Additional staff members will be added after commissioning
 

Advisory Board:
Martin Slama (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Michaelle Browers (Wake Forest University)
Najam Haider (Columbia University)
Nadje al-Ali (Brown University)
Mehran Kamrava (Georgetown University Qatar)
Christoph Günther (Erfurt University)