about
Sarah Phillips is Professor of Global Conflict and Development at The University of Sydney. Her research draws on in-depth fieldwork, and focuses on international intervention in the global south, knowledge production in conflict-affected states, state-building, and non-state governance, with a geographic focus on the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa.
Sarah is the author of three books, and is published widely in top-tiered academic journals, including International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, African Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and International Affairs. Her piece in African Affairs (co-authored with Justin Hastings) was awarded the Stephen Ellis Prize for the most innovative article in 2014-15. Sarah has also been awarded a number of prestigious competitive grants, including three from the Australian Research Council (one examining state-formation and external finance in Somalia/Somaliland, another on the organisational dynamics of maritime pirate organisations and, most recently, a project that will explore perceptions of terrorist groups in conflict-affected states).
Sarah also holds a Sydney Outstanding Academic Research (SOAR) Fellowship, and is a Research Associate at the Developmental Leadership Program (University of Birmingham, UK) and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies (Yemen and Lebanon). She has conducted extensive fieldwork (approximately five years total) in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa – particularly in Yemen, Somaliland, Kenya, Jordan, Pakistan, Oman, and Iraq – and has consulted to numerous governments and development agencies on matters pertaining to these areas.
books
WHEN THERE WAS NO AID: WAR AND PEACE IN SOMALILAND
Winner of the 2020 Australian Political Science Association (AusPSA) Crisp Prize for the best scholarly political science monograph (2018-20) and listed as one of Australian Book Review’s ‘Books of the Year’ 2020 and Foreign Affairs ‘Best Books of Year 2020’.
Sarah’s most recent book, When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland (Cornell University Press, March 2020), is concerned with the place of war in establishing and maintaining peace and civil order in a place that was unusually isolated from the international system during its foundational years. It challenges one of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South: that external intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them.
“ Sarah Phillips’s book is a remarkable study that is an example of some of the very finest research and scholarship to emerge from political science and international relations in recent years. Theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written and drawing on in-depth and sustained fieldwork conducted over many years, Phillips draws on an impressive array of literature to challenge longstanding presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South… Phillips’s argument is marshalled into an extremely readable and accessible text, making this book appealing to both experts and non-experts alike. Already receiving well justified praise and a wide readership, When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland, is destined to become a landmark text in the fields of development, international affairs, peace, conflict and security studies.”
“Phillips’s nuanced and provocative study is the most compelling account yet of Somaliland’s recent history”
“When There Was No Aid is the result of extensive fieldwork. Phillips… has drawn on this impressive research alongside other scholarly literature to produce a compelling account of Somaliland’s path to peace. While it is evidently written with an academic audience in mind – the book is grounded in theory and has an exhaustive reference list – When There Was No Aid is lively and accessible… Phillips’s most original contribution comes through her observation that stability has been maintained largely through words rather than actions.”
“The book’s short conclusion, entitled ‘why aid matters less than we think’, poses bracing reflections for development practitioners and scholars... Such a book could have struck the high-handed tone of a polemic. It doesn’t, and that owes to its careful and polished style and also the occasions where the author inserts herself into the narrative. Phillips emerges as curious, respectful and humble, thanking her interlocutors for answering so generously questions other researchers have asked before.”
“When There Was No Aid is a lucid and compelling account of Somaliland’s political development and its remarkable ability to maintain peace discursively by emphasising the omnipresent threat of a return to war and the extremely limited ability of state institutions to prevent that.”
“This remarkable study of a non-state upends dominant scholarly and policy discourses about statehood, conflict, peace, development, and international interventions... Phillips skillfully engages the relevant literature and methodological issues, and employs a creative multimethod approach to capture both the uniqueness of Somaliland and its value for comparative analysis and political theory… Highly recommended.”
Yemen and The Politics of Permanent Crisis
The Adelphi Series, 2011, Listen to Sarah discuss the book at its launch.
“This book should be on the desks of anyone studying Yemeni politics or US foreign policy in the Arabian Peninsula.”
Sarah’s second book, Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, analyses the dynamics of Yemen’s informal institutions amid rapid political and social change, and the role that Western donors and other external actors (particularly Saudi Arabia) played in facilitating the country’s crisis.
Drawing on research carried out on the ground in Yemen, this Adelphi examines the shadowy structures that govern political life and sustain a network of social elites predisposed against any far-reaching systemic reform. It looks behind the scenes at the regime's opaque internal politics, at its entrenched patronage system and at the 'rules of the game' that will shape the behaviour of the post-Saleh rulers, to offer insights for how the West may better engage within that game.
“Sarah Phillipsʼ timely new book, while succinct, provides considerable insight into the complex nature of internal Yemeni politics, and especially the motivations of its beleaguered president. Most importantly, however, it convincingly argues that the type of support provided by outside donors exacerbate the crisis rather than address the causes of tension and strife… Phillips’ contribution is invaluable.”
Yemen's Democracy Experiment in Regional Perspective: Patronage and Pluralized Authoritarianism
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
“Phillips’ masterful study forges a path for all those readers seeking clarity amidst the complexity of Yemeni politics.”
Yemen’s Democracy Experiment in Regional Perspective examines the nature of changes to Yemen's power structures, political dynamics and institutions since the intention to democratize was announced in 1990. Critiquing the ‘democratic transitions’ literature, this book explores the ways in which opposition groups and non-state actors (often inadvertently) act in support of the state actors and structures they purport to challenge.
“In this marvellously nuanced work, Sarah Phillips is enlightening on both Middle Eastern politics and the constraints generally on democratisation… This is precisely the kind of study we need in order to understand the prospects for democratic transition in the Middle East, and beyond.”
ARTICLES
selected journal articles
Sarah G. Phillips, “The Primacy of Domestic Politics and the Reproduction of Poverty and Insecurity” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 74:2 2020, 147-164.
Sarah Phillips, “Proximities of Violence: Civil Order Beyond Governance Institutions” International Studies Quarterly, 17 June 2019
Sarah Phillips, "Making al-Qa’ida legible: Counter-terrorism and the reproduction of terrorism" European Journal of International Relations, 3 April 2019, pdf ( Listen to Sarah discussing the article )
Sarah Phillips, “Order beyond the state: Explaining Somaliland’s avoidance of maritime piracy” (with Justin Hastings) Journal of Modern African Studies, 65:1, February 2018
Sarah Phillips, “Without Sultan Qaboos we would be Yemen’: The Renaissance Narrative and the political settlement in Oman” (with Jennifer Hunt) Journal of International Development, 29:5, 2017.
Sarah Phillips, “When less was more: External assistance and the political settlement in Somaliland” International Affairs 92:3, 2016, pp. 630-645.
Sarah Phillips, “Maritime Piracy Business Networks and Institutions in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea” (with Justin Hastings) African Affairs 114: 457, 2015, pp. 555-576.
Sarah Phillips, “Assisting al-Qaeda” Foreign Affairs, 30 August 2015.
Sarah Phillips, “Who Tried to Kill Ali Abdullah Saleh?” Foreign Policy, 13 June 2011.
Sarah Phillips, “Al-Qaeda and the Struggle for Yemen” Survival, 53 (1), February-March 2011, pp. 95-120.
Selected Book Chapters
Sarah Phillips, “The norm of state-monopolised violence from a Yemeni perspective” in Charlotte Epstein (Ed.) Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives, London: Routledge ‘Worlding Beyond the West’ Series, 2017.
Sarah Phillips, “Yemen” in Ellen Lust (ed.) The Middle East, 14th edition,(Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2016), pp. 895-916.
Sarah Phillips, "Questioning Failure, Stability and Risk in Yemen” in Mehran Kamrava (ed.) Fragile Politics: Weak States in the Greater Middle East (London: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2016) p.53-80.
Sarah Phillips, “Yemen” in Ellen Lust (ed.) The Middle East, 13th edition (Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2014), pp.866-886.
Sarah Phillips, “Tracing the Cracks in the Yemeni System” in David A. McMurray and Amanda Ufheil-Somers (eds) The Arab Revolts: Dispatches on Militant Democracy in the Middle East. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Sarah Phillips, “Good Governance and Air Strikes: America’s Awkward Toolkit in Yemen” in Shahram Akbarzadeh, James Piscatori, Benjamin MacQueen, Amin Saikal (eds). American Democracy Promotion in a Changing Middle East. London: Routledge, 2012.
Sarah Phillips, “Yemen” in David Coates (ed.) The Oxford Companion to American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Sarah Phillips, “What comes next in Yemen? Al-Qaeda, the Tribes and State-Building” in Yemen on the Brink, ed. Christopher Boucek and Marina Ottaway, Carnegie Endowment, Washington D.C., United States, 2010, pp. 75-89.
Sarah Phillips, “Yemen: The Centrality of Process,” Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008) pp. 231-60.
Selected Policy Monographs
Sarah Phillips, “How Oman became a ‘Positive Outlier'”, The Developmental Leadership Program (with Jennifer Hunt) April 2017.
Sarah Phillips, Evidence submitted to the UK Parliamentary Committee on the Crisis in Yemen, 2016:
Sarah Phillips, “Political Settlements and State Formation: The Case of Somaliland”, The Developmental Leadership Program, Research Paper 23, December 2013.
“Could someone please clone Sarah Phillips? The University of Sydney political scientist has a great new Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) paper out on Somaliland, following her excellent paper a few years ago on Yemen. ‘Political Settlements and State Formation: The Case of Somaliland’ may not sound like much of a page turner, but it is brilliant. Her conclusions do not make comfortable reading, for they trample on any number of received wisdoms.””
Sarah Phillips, “Talib or Taliban? Indonesian students in Pakistan and Yemen”, (with Anthony Bubalo, and Samina Yasmeen) Lowy Institute for International Policy, September 2011.
Sarah Phillips, “Yemen: Developmental Dysfunction and Division in a Crisis State”, The Developmental Leadership Program, Research Paper 14, February 2011.
media
Sarah writes and comments regularly on the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa for Australian and international media outlets, including BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, ABC Radio and Television, The Guardian, The Economist, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, al-Jazeera, The Financial Times, Jane’s Defense Weekly, Reuters, The Jamestown Terrorism Monitor, The Lowy Interpreter, The Christian Science Monitor, The National, Gulf News, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age.
selected audio
Who were al-Qa’ida "really" in Yemen?
with War Spot Jackie Dent, 13 September 2020
selected video
Ending War: Lessons from Somaliland - Richard Iron CMG OBE in conversation with Dr Sarah Phillips, Sept 2020
Australian named among victims as Kenyan terror attack continues, 23 Sep 2013
Sarah Phillips discusses the current political situation in Yemen and the issues that threaten its transition.
One Plus One, ABC News, 6 May 2011
This episode of One Plus One features Sydney University Centre for International Security Studies academic Dr. Sarah Phillips
selected print
Sarah Phillips, "Bombing of Yemen comes with no perfect reasons or proof the Houthis are puppets of Iran", Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 2015.
Sarah Phillips, "Yemen crisis: A domestic affair made worse by foreign meddling", Lowy Interpreter, 30 March 2015
Sarah Phillips, "Figurehead comes to light within al-Qa'ida's most dangerous franchise," The Australian, 5 May 2011.
Sarah Phillips, "Western policymakers shouldn't accept this Saleh spin," The Guardian, 10 April 2011.
Sarah Phillips, "Yemen terrorists are pawns of power," The Australian, 5 April 2011.
Sarah Phillips, "Yemen asks for aid to ward off Al-Qaeda," The Australian, 16 March 2010. PDF
Sarah Phillips, "US risks boost to al-Qa'ida by Yemen attacks," The Australian, 19 January 2010.
