No Peace Process in Yemen Will Hold Without Addressing the Question of Who Governs Aden لا يمكن لأي عملية سلام في اليمن أن تصمد دون معالجة مسألة من يحكم عدن

Every round of Yemen peace talks is organised around the same binary: the Houthis on one side, the internationally recognised government on the other, with Saudi Arabia and Oman as mediators and the United Nations as facilitator. The framework has a surface logic to it. It maps onto the formal structure of the conflict as it was understood in 2015, when the Houthis swept out of the north and the government fled to Riyadh.

The problem is that Yemen in 2026 is not Yemen in 2015. The most consequential political development of the intervening years has been the emergence of the Southern Transitional Council as a third force — one that controls most of Aden, commands significant military assets, enjoys UAE backing, and has a political programme entirely incompatible with the unified Yemen that both the internationally recognised government and the Houthis nominally accept.

The STC wants independence for the south, or at a minimum a federal arrangement that preserves southern political autonomy. Neither the Houthis nor the Sana’a government accept this. The international community, committed to Yemen’s unity as a diplomatic principle, has spent years pretending the STC problem can be managed through the Riyadh Agreement framework. It cannot.

Any settlement that does not explicitly address the question of southern governance will not hold. The STC has demonstrated that it can disrupt any arrangement from which it is excluded. The question is not whether the southern issue can be avoided — it cannot. The question is whether the regional and international actors who have the leverage to force a comprehensive negotiation have the political will to do so.