Description
This paper examines the Houthi's use of water as a weapon within the group's struggle with the Yemeni government. Previous groups have used natural resources to support their campaign, such as Al-Shabaab’s sale of charcoal as a source of funding, but it is less common for those natural resources to be the weapon of terror. The paper compares the Houthi’s use of water to Islamic State’s control of the Tigris and Euphrates in the mid-2010s and argues that while the latter used that control to extend their social and political power in the region, the Houthis used denial of water as a punishment strategy against resistant communities. Drawing on the literature on terrorism and the environment and Mbembe’s necropolitics, the paper asks whether the weaponization of an essential resource, water, is simply a different type of rebel tactic or whether it represents a conceptually distinct phenomenon.