Shabwa and Cracks in the Foundation of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council
Recent fighting in Shabwa highlights lack of unity of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, threatening its ability to present a common front against the Houthis.
Gregory D. Johnsen
Non-Resident Fellow, AGSIW; Former Member, U.N. Panel of Experts on Yemen
Gregory D. Johnsen is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan, a Fulbright Fellow in Yemen, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Egypt. In 2013-14 he was selected as BuzzFeed’s inaugural Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow where he won a Dirksen Award from the National Press Foundation and, in collaboration with Radiolab, a Peabody Award. He has a PhD from Princeton University and master’s degrees from Princeton and the University of Arizona. Johnsen is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia (W.W. Norton), which has been translated into multiple languages. From 2016-18 he served on the Yemen Panel of Experts for the United Nations Security Council. In 2019, he served as the lead writer for the United States Institute of Peace’s Syria Study Group. His writing on Yemen and terrorism has appeared in, among others, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy.
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