Since the onset of the war in Yemen, checkpoints have become a central mechanism by which authority is exercised, allowing competing state or rebel authorities to control the movement of people and cargo. The implications of this shift are far-reaching, encompassing everything from territorial control to conflict financing; the undermining of state authority to security sector reform; and the cost of goods to peacebuilding efforts.

Against this backdrop, the paper analyses the strategic Abyan–Aden–Lahej–al Dhale’a–Dhamar corridor, which is currently subject to two competing political orders, one nominally legitimate (the Government of Yemen and its partners) and the other not (the Houthi rebels based in the northwest). These rival political orders translate into two contrasting mobility regimes: in areas (at least nominally) held by the central government, the regime is fragmented and decentralised; while in Houthi-held areas a more centralised and digitised regime prevails. Both regimes rely on widespread extraction from circulation, with traders subject to coercive practices and consumers forced to pay higher prices as a result. Crucially, a significant proportion of the funds raised goes towards sustaining Yemen’s civil war, more than a decade after it erupted.

Yemen’s checkpoints have, over recent decades, evolved into multi-purpose sites of hybrid governance. Today, their functions include security screening; counterterrorism; counter-smuggling and counterintelligence; fiscal extraction; corridor regulation; political signalling; and logistics control. The fact that many of Yemen’s paved roads are in a poor state or have been arbitrarily closed has reduced mobility choices, increasing the population’s reliance on checkpoint heavy highways or secondary roads.

The rise of Yemen’s competing checkpoint regimes has negatively affected not only those whose livelihoods depend on transporting commodities, but the welfare of those reliant on such goods. Moreover, in terms of humanitarian access and service delivery programming, the fragmentation of authority has made it harder to pursue a more regionally based approach. Instead, organisations must conduct negotiations on both a node-by-node and corridor wide basis, putting further strain on resource mobilisation at a time of declining international aid.

In sum, road security and revenue collection, once seen as sovereign duties, have today become little more than arenas for predatory extraction and control. In a country already worn out by long years of conflict, this has come at the direct expense of civilian welfare, the credibility of state authority and private sector viability.

Only by gradually restoring the state’s monopoly over violence can Yemen’s many parallel modalities of extraction be reduced and, ultimately, dismantled. In the short-to-medium term, potential avenues that could be pursued by the Government of Yemen and supportive international actors include a concerted push to reduce discretionary enforcement authority; a review of abused revenue collection laws; the standardisation of corridor procedures; and the revival of local-level accountability mechanisms.

This paper forms part of a series of working papers presenting case studies from TRACE (Trade, Rents, and Authority in borderland Checkpoint Economies) project, and was first published on the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) website.