From 23 February through 30 March 2017, the Yemen Polling Center (YPC) conducted a study to understand Yemeni citizens’ perceptions toward the economic and political situation in Yemen amid the growing security chaos. The center received responses from 4,000 individuals from all Yemeni governorates except Sa’dah and Soqotra, and women represented 50% of the respondents. Twenty-nine percent of respondents reported completing at least secondary school, and over 6 percent reported having a college degree. The majority of respondents (75.6%) were between the age of 18 to 45.
Social Trust as a Path to Peace
Brookings recently published a piece by Tamara Coffman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy and the author of “Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy.” In the article, she argues for the importance of improving governance systems in the Middle East as a means for peacebuilding. Noting that discussions of the region often focus on problems such as terrorism, wars, and those displaced by them, she stresses that these issues are merely the symptoms of a larger problem in many Middle Eastern countries which still needs to be addressed.