A Few Observations on Omani-Yemeni Relations since the 1960s - Helen Lackner

Helen Lackner has worked as a consultant in social aspects of rural development in over thirty countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. She has spent the past four decades researching Yemen, working in the country for fifteen years. Lackner is currently Associate Researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She was the 2016 Sir William Luce Fellow at Durham University and is a Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. The editor of Journal of the British-Yemeni Society, she is also a regular contributor to Oxford Analytica’s briefs and openDemocracy. Her publications include Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State and Why Yemen Matters: A Society in Transition (editor). 

Helen Lackner has been involved with Yemen for almost half a century and the peninsula even longer. In her lecture at the British Omani Society, she discussed the transformations in relations between the Sultanate of Oman and the different Yemeni states during this period. She particularly focussed on the social, political and economic contexts of the two countries, looking at how the state of Yemen has changed frequently and drastically over the last half a century under numerous political leaders, in comparison with Oman’s relative stability and steady development under Sultan Qaboos bin Said.