When national causes lose their appeal: a study of Yemen’s unity as framed by official political discourse

Yemen has witnessed a merger of its south and north in 1990, which has survived a split in 1994 civil war. During the war official media were successful in mobilizing the public and political forces to support unity and defeat the southern forces that declared independence few weeks after the war had broken out. Now, a southern movement has risen to demand, among other things, what it calls ‘equal citizenship’. Due to various reasons including negative government response to its demands, leaders of the movement demand independence now. In response, official news reportings keep promoting unity and warning of secessionist calls. However, secessionist sentiments seem to be on the rise and the public does not seem to pay much attention to the news about unity. This research tries to study why and how media frames of national causes can lose their effect over time. It attempts to identify the limits of public news framing of national causes from both constructivist and structural points of view. It concludes that in the absence of diverse national discourses that represent the social totality of a community, the persistent positive framing of national unity by public discourse at times of crises is more likely to create not only a public frustration as a result of loss of credibility, but also a public feeling of alienation. This kind of feeling tends to be reflected in as much public reluctance to national unity discourse as insensitivity to the calls that might assert sub-national identities as a way of change. -- Relevance to Development Studies -- Studies of media can be seen as an evidence of the importance of language and meaning-making in both the formulation and implementation of public policies. Studies of framing particularly reflect the importance of the recognition of the major challenges of public policy design and implementation, due to the limits to both identifying the correct problem and influencing those outside one’s control during implementation, which limits require us to ‘understand and learn from/with others’ (Gasper and Tankha, 2010) . Underpinning essential development values like ‘inclusion’ and ‘representation’, studying framing process as such is important as it gives us an indication as to both who and how problems are identified and who take decisions to address them. In Yemen where broadcasting media is monopolized by the government, the study of public media in view of how it frames a national issue, like national unity, is especially important. It will enable us to explore not only the extent to which public policies (in this case national unity policies) are representative based on how problems are identified and , but also how the systems of thought (which policy literature and experts recommend to avoid) is dominant in the formulation and implementation of such policies.