Yemen, 2011 — popular revolt attempt

Event Summary

The dataset records an event coded as a popular revolti in Yemen beginning around 27 January 2011, the opening of the mass uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh that formed part of the wider Arab Spring sweeping the region. Inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, tens of thousands of Yemenis poured into the streets of Sanaa and other cities in late January 2011, demanding an end to the more than three decade rule of Saleh, who had governed since 1978 amid deepening poverty, corruption, unemployment, and the fragmentation of the impoverished state. The protests, initially calling for reform and then for Saleh's outright departure, swelled through the following months into a sustained revolutionary movement, met with violent repression that killed many demonstrators and eventually fractured the military and the ruling elite as key commanders and tribes defected to the opposition.

Saleh clung to power for months, surviving a June 2011 assassination attempt that gravely wounded him, before finally agreeing, under a Gulf brokered deal, to step down in late 2011 and formally transfer power in early 2012. Yemen's revolution, however, gave way not to stability but to a descent into civil war.