Performing Development in Street

Markets: Hegemony,
Governmentality, and the Qat
Industry of Sana’a, Yemen

John Lauermann
Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA;
jlauermann@clarku.edu

Abstract: A legal drug commonly consumed in Yemen, qat is often a flashpoint over
development and business practice. Qat markets are sites for exploring the interaction
between cultural economic practices surrounding qat production, urban politics, and
broader questions of development in Yemen. Given the weakness of the Yemeni state
relative to other institutions, this context is particularly helpful in theorizing localized
forms of governance. Using interviews with various members of the qat industry in Sana’a,
Yemen’s largest city, this paper discusses the spatial and discursive strategies of qat vendors
as they seek to produce and regulate their economic spaces. Central to this discussion is an
exploration of Laclau’s framework of hegemony and Foucault’s ideas of governmentality,
in the context of struggles for control over economic space playing out on the streets of
Sana’a.

Keywords: qat, Yemen, street markets, hegemony, governmentality

Introduction
Souk Hiaal, one of many open air markets in Sana’a, the Republic of Yemen’s capital
and home to roughly 2.7 million Yemenis (Central Statistical Office 2004), is at
first glance chaotic. Every day hundreds of vendors descend on street and sidewalk
space in several contiguous blocks, closing the streets to traffic. These vendors
perturb city officials and horrify development experts partially because their activities
preclude auto traffic in the streets, and because the entire hubbub at this market
is due to the sale of a “drug”, a leafy, amphetamine-like stimulant known as qat.1
Legal in Yemen, qat is an anchor of contemporary Yemeni society, maintaining a
notable presence at social events ranging from weddings to business negotiations,
and providing a medium for extensive social interaction at everyday qat “chewing
sessions”. Unsurprisingly then, it is a major element of Yemeni society and economy,
with 70% of households reporting at least one qat consumer in a recent survey
(see Milanovic 2008) and an estimated 49% of men and 13% of women consuming
qat in another national survey (Central Statistical Office 2007). Despite complaints
that qat culture leads to lazy workers, spendthrift consumers, deadbeat heads
of household, and environmental problems (mainly pertaining to groundwater
depletion associated with growing the crop), in 2006 the qat industry employed
at least 14% of the Yemeni labor force and accounted for 6% of national GDP

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(and one third of agricultural GDP) (Republic of Yemen 2008). Qat’s contested status
in Yemeni society, in development discourses, and in the commercial landscape of
Yemeni cities speaks to broader questions of development, business practice, and
street space. I examine how qat vendors (often street vendors) construct and are
constructed by various business and development rhetorical frameworks, and how
the spaces in which they sell are produced by and serve to facilitate these discursive
constructions. By exploring discursive frameworks commonly employed in qat retail
and in Yemeni development debates, I discuss how these vendors internalize and
perform cultural economic knowledge systems surrounding socio-spatial hegemonic
relationships associated with qat, development, and street space.
These dynamics can be explored by discussing the practices and rhetoric
deployed in producing and regulating the various economic spaces of the industry,
particularly street markets in Sana’a. With questions of spatial governance in mind,
I explore the ways in which forms of hegemony and processes of governmentality
are coproduced. As I explain later, hegemonic relations are produced in part
through governmentality in that subjects internalize the ethos of various hegemonic
governances, and governmentality always implies some hegemonic project of rule—
it is not an anonymous constellation of control but rather part of a traceable
governance project produced by identifiable actors. The process of governmentality
facilitates hegemonic positionality (and contestations thereof) just as the very
existence of such hegemonies necessitates governmentalities in the first place.
Economic performativity—the notion that economic knowledge and rhetoric can be
constructively enacted through practice—speaks to the mechanisms by which this
process is accomplished. One’s position in a hegemonic formation is internalized
through governmentality; this internalization takes place performatively at the level
of speech and practice in that the articulation of one’s position produces that
position. Empirically, my discussion of qat retailing demonstrates the utility of such
a framework by clarifying that governance is a project emanating from numerous
actors and manifesting at local scales. This is in no small part due to the fact that
the Yemeni state is relatively weak and thus other institutions arise as important
governance sources: this case points to a need to more thoroughly theorize the
sources, projects, and effects of rule.
My argument expands empirical literatures on street markets, urban development
politics, and global South economic geographies, in that it contributes to
discussions of street markets as economic spaces (Crewe 2000, 2003; Dierwecther
2004; Elyachar 2005), and especially how they interface with modernist urban
development (Carey 2008; Cross 2000; Seligmann 2000; Spector 2008). This speaks
to broader debates over urban development politics (Appadurai 2002; Bromley
2000; Elyachar 2005; Scott 1998) by devoting attention to economic geographies
in global South contexts—conceptualized in their own right, rather than only as
development geographies (see discussions by Murphy 2008; Gibson-Graham 2005,
2006, 2008). The paper furthermore broadens engagement with two theoretical
frameworks often employed to varying degrees of success in development studies
and geographies research: namely, those pertaining to accounts of hegemony and
the concept of governmentality. My discussion furthermore can benefit scholars and
policy makers by providing empirically grounded analysis of Yemen’s contemporary


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cultural economies, contributing, for example, to development debates in the sense

that many recent discussions on the topic (Almas and Scholz 2006; Milanovic
2008; Republic of Yemen 2008; Yemen Today 2009) are often rather uniformly
critical of qat, and tend to lack data to back their respective claims about qat and
development. To empirically verify my claims, I draw on qualitative data from a
2009 study of business practices and networks in the qat industry—which included
85 semi-structured interviews with 111 industry-associated actors (eg vendors,
farmers, temporary laborers, government officials) informed by direct observation
and various interview-verification techniques (group and follow-up interviews, etc).
Most of the interviews, conducted in Yemeni colloquial Arabic with the help of
two Sana’ani field assistants (and later translated and transcribed with the help of
the same assistants), focused on how actors engage with various cultural economic
frameworks—pertaining to debates over Islam and capitalist business practice, ideas
of development and modernity, or familial obligations—to produce and regulate
the various economic spaces of the qat industry in Sana’a.2
In the next section I situate my argument relative to theoretical discussions
of hegemony, governmentality, and performativity. In two subsequent sections I
draw on this to discuss the intersections between street market space and urban
development discourse, and then link that relationship more clearly to business
rhetoric, performativity, and subject formation. I conclude the paper by considering
the implications of this study for understanding urban economies and politics more
generally.

Hegemony, Governmentality, and Economic

Performativity
Ernesto Laclau’s (1996; Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000; Laclau and Mouffe 2001
[1985]) concept of hegemony provides a useful entry point: in Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (2001 [1985]) he and Chantal Mouffe argue that power is
constantly shifting in various “hegemonic formations”, discursive relationships in
which particular sets of knowledge and meaning attain contingent hegemony,
which is conditioned by the competing elements that contest such a privileged
position. As I expand the concept later, hegemony can be thought of in spatial terms:
hegemonies materialize in qat market space, and at different scales of governance.
In the most literal sense of their text, hegemony implies a linguistic process in
which it is produced and constantly reconfigured via contingent articulations (Laclau
and Mouffe 2001 [1985]:105). This involves a relational field of identities and
significations such that:
The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which
partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness
of the social . . . Every social practice is therefore—in one of its dimensions—articulatory.
As it is not the internal moment of a self-defined totality, it cannot simply be the
expression of something already acquired, it cannot be wholly subsumed under the
principle of repetition; rather, it always consists in the construction of new differences
(113).


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Thus relations of hegemony imply multiple, overlapping, and constantly shifting

governance projects such that “Only the presence of a vast area of floating
elements and the possibility of their articulation to opposite camps—which implies
a constant redefinition of the latter—is what constitutes the terrain permitting us
to define a practice as hegemonic” (136). Through various discursive practices
certain sets of meanings and forms of knowledge attain hegemony. Importantly
for my purposes, this articulation is productive in a discursive and material
sense: hegemonic formations do not simply express preexisting positionalities
but are constructed and contested through articulation. This process is a means
of conceptually expressing antagonisms that incorporate both the material and
the discursive (Laclau 2006:106), and understanding the material impetuses and
results of articulating hegemony. A further logical outcome of this contingency
is that hegemonies can form at different scales. In the case of qat, local
hegemonies form in street markets as vendors draw upon knowledge and
rhetoric pertaining to the business of qat production to engage with and attain
spatial hegemonies. That is, actors use rhetorical and practice-based strategies
and tactics (de Certeau 1984) to produce and appropriate market spaces to
materialize hegemonic positions. This is done while simultaneously engaging with
various hegemonic discursive frameworks like those surrounding modernity and
development, the extended family network, or the informal “codes of conduct”
necessary for maintaining business networks.3 Since hegemony implies a contingent
relationality, the fixing of meanings in and through spaces is itself a contingent
articulation.
Notions of hegemony can be combined with Michel Foucault’s concept of
“governmentality” to explore the formation of hegemonic relationships, particularly
the production of subject positions within such formations. In basic terms, for
Foucault “[t]o govern . . . is to structure the possible field of action of others”
(1982:221) while governmentality can be understood as an “art of governance”
(1991:87) in which “one has a triangle, sovereignty–discipline–government, which
has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the
apparatuses of security” (102). Governmentality is usually conceptualized as a
mode of governance in which various institutional authorities conduct or lead
subjects (and to facilitate this process, control objects) such that the objectives
of that governance are internalized by those subjects. While governance most
basically includes exercising external control over persons, populations, and things,
governmentality implies self-regulation as the subject internalizes governance logic.
The concept relies on Foucault’s relational conceptualization of power as a “way of
acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being
capable of action” such that “what defines a relationship of power is that it is a
mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it
acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those
which may arise in the present or the future” (1982:220). In this way, “the subject”
comes into being by internalizing the ethos of various modes of governance; most
famously, perhaps, in Jeremy Bentham’s “panoptic” sense (Foucault 1977). This is
not to imply that “the” subject only fashions herself to either reflect governance
objectives or resist governance; total acceptance and complete rejection are both


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unlikely outcomes. Rather, processes of governmentality are more or less totalizing

depending on the context of governance.
Foucault’s original project explored institutional forms of social control (the prison,
sexuality, etc) related to the rise of modernist, nation-state power. Unsurprisingly
then, much commentary on governmentality has focused on processes emanating
from and reinforcing the status of the (neoliberal) state (Herbert 2005; Rose
1993, 1996; Sparke 2006). In global South contexts the source of governance is
often attributed to “developmental states” (Evans 1995) and global development
institutions like the World Bank (Bryant 2002; Goldman 2001; Hanson 2007;
Nightingale 2005; Walker et al 2008). This literature is of course not monolithic,
and both focus on the neoliberal state and overly essentialist critiques of that
academic project have been criticized (Tamas 2007; Wilson 2006). I view processes
of governmentality as operating in scale and space contingent ways,4 stemming
from multiple sources, and practiced towards multiple ends. Qat vendors espouse
different discursive frameworks when, for example, dealing with family politics
in a rural wholesale market than when interacting with competitors in the retail
markets of central Sana’a or with bureaucrats in government facilities; they react
not simply to the state, particularly in Yemen where the state is rather weak, but
also to institutions as diverse as the family or religious establishments. Appadurai
(2002) speaks to a compatible academic project of focus on governmentalities
via circulations instead of locations (and associated panoptic explanations of
behavior) while Agrawal references governmentalities as emanating from multiple
sites and scales of “intimate government” (2005:178–179). A more explicitly multi-
institutional, multi-scalar application of governmentality to development theory is
Michael Watts’ (2003) analysis of “governable spaces” in Nigeria, through which
management of social instability was compartmentalized as various state and
economic actors created abstract governable spaces in which discourses pertaining
to chieftainship, indigeneity, and nationalism served to regulate social unrest in
oil-rich delta regions. Streets in Sana’a, particularly street markets, can be viewed
as a similar form of governable spaces as business interests, familial networks,
property owners, and city government all vie for hegemony—or at least struggle to
articulate themselves in terms of existing hegemonic formations—by conditioning
the business practices and relationships of qat vendors.
Commenting on questions of power as conceptualized in development studies,
development geographer Katharine McKinnon (2008) juxtaposes approaches
drawing on Foucault—particularly governmentality approaches—with Laclau’s
ideas of hegemony, suggesting that development scholars should focus on
how the “coming in to being of the subject is also a process through which
hegemonies are contested and transformed” (290). By focusing on the multiple
sources and spaces of governance (in this case the production and regulation
of market space), notions of governmentality and hegemony can be used to
contextualize each other by examining how practices of governmentality produce
productive power relations. Hegemony describes and complicates notions of
power while governmentality is a process facilitating its enactment. This is not a
relationship in which governmentality instrumentally channels hegemonic logics
[an understanding Barnett (2005) critiques in neoliberal governmentality literature]


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but rather a dialectical process of coproduction. Li (1999) and Moore (2000)

provide theoretically compatible, though not explicitly articulated, examples of
ideas commonly associated with “hegemony” and “governmentality” used in
conjunction. Foucault suggests something along these lines when discussing power
relationships as a form of “agonism”, “a relationship which is at the same time
reciprocal incitation and struggle” (1982:222). At the scale of the individual qat
market, cultural economic frameworks associated with a variety of institutions—
like extended families, supply chains, or the markets themselves—are internalized
and performed as hegemonic relationships are constituted and negotiated. These
micro-scale techniques of governmentality are often separate from (though of
course contextualized by) those emanating from state sources, just as hegemony
on a more local scale can be viewed as simultaneously part of and separate from
state power structures. These “local hegemonies” are not simply microcosms of
broader governance structures, but rather represent qualitatively distinct power
distributions. As I later document, these more complex forms of hegemony and
governmentality serve to problematize understandings of the debates surrounding
those institutions and their place in broader Yemeni society (specifically relative to
development debates).
Coproduction of hegemony and governmentality can be explained partially by
viewing cultural economic discourses and practices as performative. As in Butler’s
discussion of gender performativity (1990,1997,2009) where “acts, gestures,
enactments generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence
or identity they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and
sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (1990:136), this
concept implies a (materially) productive internalization and performance of broader
norms and knowledge systems. The performative parallels notions of performances
[in Goffman’s (1959) sense of the term] though it references their materially
constructive nature; I use both terms to reference performative action. Similarly,
economic sociologists (Callon 1998, 1999; MacKenzie, Muniesa and Sui 2007) have
argued that economic practices, particularly pertaining to neoclassical economic
academe and policy-making in the global North, are performative in that the
privileging of economic discourses and valorizing of forms of economic knowledge—
especially associated with “the market”—help produce the economic conditions
being studied. Barnes (2008) has made a similar argument about economic
geography as a subdiscipline. Gibson-Graham (2008) argued that recent work
in heterodox economic studies focused on “diverse economies” constitutes a
performative epistemology in the sense that alternative economic activities are
reinforced, via policy, due to the fact that they are privileged as objects of
study. Performative engagement with economic discourses and knowledge can
“produce” economies; similarly, market relationships can be constructed through
their enactment (Elyachar 2005). So in the context of qat vendors in Sana’a, the
various sets of practices and rhetoric used in street markets are performative in
that they produce markets and market space by valorizing and enacting cultural
economic knowledge. The key point for a discussion of governmentality and
hegemony is that these sets of practices and rhetoric have to be articulated and
internalized to be performed, and their performance both reflects and produces


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hegemonic formations in the qat market. Following this line of analysis I examine
the performative elements producing the qat market—both the market space and
the abstract market of economic interaction. This involves, for instance, exploring
how particular forms of economic knowledge and business praxis are employed
and valorized, and how this informs business and labor practice and the production
of market space. This can involve, for example, drawing on Islamic frameworks to
define what it means to be a “good” businessperson, or on development rhetoric
to define ideas of “modern” capitalism, and then constructing those ideals through
spatial and discursive interactions with competitors and consumers.
Previous work on qat culture in Yemen (Varisco 1986, 2007; Wedeen 2008;
Weir 1985) points to the performative nature of qat consumption, in that the
act of gathering over, and consuming, qat serves to facilitate the enactment of
various social relationships (and associated discursive frameworks). Gathering in
“qat parties” has been discussed as a performance and forum (Wedeen 2008)—for
example for rhetoric surrounding community obligation and benefit (Weir 1985),
of social prestige and conspicuous consumption (Varisco 1986; Weir 1985), or
even anti- and post-colonial politics in both Yemen (Varisco 1986) and Somalia
(Cassanelli 1986; Gebissa 2004). One can also discuss performance associated
with qat production. Qat and the rhetoric surrounding its cultural economy
facilitate the constructive enactment of economic relationships and meanings
while providing a tool for generalizing and concealing them. Most basically Marx
pointed to something similar in his discussion of commodities as co-opting (labor)
relationships—simultaneously representing and alienating discursive elements from
their material referents through ideology or commodity fetishism. A similar
argument—that capitalist relationships rely on the simultaneous representation
and obscuring of underlying socioeconomic relationships—can be extended to the
spaces of the commodity’s production and reproduction (Benjamin 1999; Lefebvre
1991 [1974]).
Qat, as a commodity and as the anchor of particular sets of cultural economic
frameworks, illustrates the processes by which hegemonies in economic space are
articulated and internalized. Qat the commodity serves to anchor and center broader
social practices and rhetoric as a performative statement of who one is as a qat
consumer or as a mûqāwât—literally a “qat vendor”, not to be confused with a
vendor in general (bai’) as the root of the Yemeni Arabic word is “qat”. Performances
surrounding qat retailing range from the flamboyant—in the qat market vendors
go so far as to allow customers to facetiously kiss and pinch their cheeks during
the haggling process—to the mundane practices of everyday business transactions:
buying from, hiring, or working for particular people, selling in particular markets,
or even in particular areas within a given market. That these practices assemble a
variety of meanings (and that some meanings attain hegemony) renders qat, and
market spaces in which it is traded, duplicitous, concealing some meanings while
privileging others. However, as the case of qat illustrates, the processes described
by these terms serve to obscure much more than labor relations. Like “the market”
of Western businesspeople invested in the tenets of neoclassical economics, qat and
qat markets as rhetorical objects do much more than just represent relationships.
They are discursive sites where broader cultural economic frameworks and processes


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pertaining to ideas of Islam, community, and business practice; or to questions of

development and modernity are performed.
Thus qat and qat markets are assigned and convey meanings, concealing some
and representing others. The implication of these notions of the commodity or the
economic space as serving a type of capitalist relationship is that they do not provide
a simply straightforward representation. Rather, they imply a series of duplicitous
(though not necessarily intentionally so) performances as particular knowledge
systems and power relations are valorized. Reifying or fetishizing qat and qat markets
via the performative internalization of various modes of governance (as I discuss in
the remainder of the paper, pertaining to issues like urban development) imbues
qat industry spatiality with a distinct set of cultural economic values; facilitating,
reproducing, and concealing the broader discourses of which it is part. The end
goal pursued by the various actors involved with qat is, of course, that particular
sets of meanings will attain socio-spatial hegemony, or at least successfully engage
with existing hegemonies.

Street Space, Urban Development Discourse

The coproduction of hegemonic formations and governmentality processes can
be seen in qat industry business practices; specifically the ways in which those
working with qat engage various discursive frameworks and cultural economic
networks. One particularly salient example is that pertaining to the development
discourses employed by the Yemeni state and non-governmental influences. With
low levels of social legitimacy (as demonstrated by recent mass protests inspired
by Tunisia’s 2011 “jasmine revolution”), limited revenues, and sparse institutional
infrastructures, especially outside major urban areas, the state itself is relatively weak.
Thus non-state institutions like development organizations, extended families, and
religious establishments can play relatively large roles in governance. Rooted in
modernist goals based on economic growth and gains in efficiency, development
rhetoric is often less than accommodating towards the “traditional” and “inefficient”
practices surrounding qat. Gebissa (2004) discusses at length how colonial and
postcolonial governments in the states where qat is common (Yemen, Ethiopia,
Somalia, and Djibouti) have portrayed the commodity as economically, socially,
and morally problematic, and have unsuccessfully attempted to restrict or even ban
its use on several occasions over the past century. More recently, a state report
written in conjunction with the World Bank and the United Nations Development
Program argues: “[d]espite the significant economic opportunities for qat producers
and suppliers, the net effect of qat consumption is negative for Yemen’s economic
development . . . [q]at impacts the economy in a negative manner through the
opportunity cost of lost savings as well as lost work-hours.” However, the report
begrudgingly continues that qat “is far too well integrated into the Yemeni
economy and social structure to be eliminated on a short-term basis without
adverse effects” (Republic of Yemen 2008:43). My interviews with state and non-
governmental organization officials revealed a similar general negativity toward
the commodity. Critiques of the industry range from complaints over household
expenditures on qat—presumably at the expense of other items [Weir (1985)


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extensively discusses and contests this argument]—to using “green neoliberal”

(Goldman 2001; Hanson 2007; Nightingale 2005) development discourses to cast
qat farmers as environmentally irresponsible in light of Yemen’s rapidly subsiding
aquifers [Almas and Scholz 2006; Worth 2009; cf Caton (2010) and Gebissa (2004),
who point out that reliance on a cash crop like qat is usually a response to increasing
rural population densities and, presumably, concomitant rises in water usage].
Given this general negativity toward the industry, combined with a relative disdain
for noisy, disorganized street markets in modernist urban planning, qat markets are
sites of continual spatial conflict as vendors, market owners, police, and tax collectors
struggle over the practice of selling qat in the street. Not unlike in many Global
South cities, one can find multiple stories of “official” markets being built to house
previously existing street markets. Following construction, street spaces are often
regulated to force vendors into the formal markets. Spatial conflicts often originate
from the construction of these markets, which by default delegitimize vending in the
original spaces of the market, the streets of the neighborhood. However, this control
over market space is also actively resisted by qat vendors despite the possibility of
fines, not necessarily through grandiose action but through a constant barrage of
simple tactics (de Certeau 1984; Scott 1985) like “forgetting” that new laws forbid
them from selling in the streets. One exasperated tax collector described the cat-
and-mouse game played by police and street vendors near his market, telling me:
The police don’t tell them [street vendors] to go away from the market, they only tell
them to go to a place inside [the market]. If the police come back every day continuously
the vendors can’t stay. If there are no police they will come back . . . this is qat . . . selling
qat is like this.

In summary, he complained “I try to ask them to go inside, but they do not

understand: they do not listen or care.” This “politics of the ground”—conflicts over
the right to work in street space sitting on the ground—by no means bifurcates
vendor and “official” interests however. While numerous vendors do resist efforts
to move them inside formal market spaces, others strategically engage “official”
discourses on the importance of regulating street space. Unsurprisingly, these are
often vendors who rent space in official markets and stand to lose from street
vendors reaching customers before they even pass through the market gates. One
vendor observed that immediately outside his rented shop “Two weeks ago there
were vendors on the ground. After that, the police came, and there are only people
in the shops now. And that’s good . . . Because the streets are crowded and cars
cannot move through. This is good” (Vendor 55). Likewise, just as politics of the
ground involves porous borders between vendor and market management interests,
so too do they entail a blurred distinction between the “inside” and “outside” of
markets. There is no clear inside–outside or private–public dichotomy in regards to
markets in Sana’a; rather, vendors move discursively and spatially inside and outside
the official market to further their business strategies. Another vendor seemed to
summarize the pragmatic approach many take towards politics of the ground,
telling me “Look, it is better when you sell outside in the line [on the street].
When you are by the cars you make a lot of money, but here [inside] is more
comfortable, and this is [after all] a market for this kind of qat [the kind I sell]”


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(Vendor 63). In short, various positions around a market, in both the spatial and
rhetorical sense, are to be utilized in different scenarios, suggesting notable diversity
within business objectives and strategies. The localized forms of hegemony in qat
markets, and their relationships with broader hegemonic norms in Yemeni society,
are not stable positions to be attained, but are rather constantly negotiated. The
various articulations and performances of these positions speak to how qat vendors
internalize (or at least engage) the ethos of these same hegemonic formations,
suggesting processes of governmentality.
A street market in the old city of Sana’a was undergoing similar conflicts during the
course of my fieldwork. In an effort to clear the narrow streets for traffic hundreds of
street vendors were displaced, though the qat vendors remained largely untouched
because they sell on a relatively quiet side street, and, given the lucrative nature of
qat retail relative to other forms of vending, have the financial ability to “convince”
police to leave them alone. Abdullah, a qat vendor and one of my long-term
informants, summarized this conflict in story format, pointing to the often blurred
lines between fines and bribes in dealing with Sana’ani police:
Before the police would come to the market to shut out these people for one day or
two days, and then they would just leave them. This time, this year is different. They
[police] are in the market all of the time continually . . . These people who work for the
government, they take the people who sell things on the ground. If the vendor pays him
money, like 200 or 500 [rial, roughly USD 1.00 or 2.50 respectively], then the police will
leave him alone . . . Always the people selling things in the street, if they hear about or
see the police coming they just take their things and leave fast. If the police take him,
the person, and he goes away from the market it is no problem. If the police grab him
he will have to pay the police [a fine], 500 or 1000, or go to the Ministry of Police. If he
goes to the Ministry he has a big problem with fines and convictions, so it is good for
this man to pay the police.

He continued by casting work on the street as one of the few economic

options available in Yemen (as I discuss in the next section, this is a common,
though sometimes contradictory, rhetorical strategy among many I interviewed),
arguing:
The government is uneducated and doesn’t know anything. The government wants to
make places on the street for walking. Now many people will be poor and without
work . . . The government must make a . . . market for these people to work. Now it’s
horrible. Bad, bad, bad country! Everyone works for his family and for his food in the
market. And now from where are the people to get money for their family? . . . Everybody
works for his family, for their food. If the government shuts him out it will not be good.

Abdullah then concluded by implying a certain level of ethical equivalence between

police corruption and the exertion of state control in street space, articulating his
criticism by drawing on the same discursive frameworks surrounding corruption as
scapegoat5 so often used in development discussions:
The police are looking for ways to get money . . . for themselves; they are looking for
anything to make a little bit of money. They will take down umbrellas or anything in the
street. And after that if you have a shop [stand] or an umbrella you will take it down
or you will pay the police. It is stealing . . . [However qat vendors are left alone.] This is


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Performing Development in Street Markets 11

because the government wants to get tax from the qat vendors. The other people who
sell in the street do not pay tax . . . Just give the police money and they will leave.

Abdullah’s narrative strategically engages with a variety of discourses surrounding

street space in the city, casting work in the qat market as the last economic
strategy available for poor Yemenis which is simultaneously one of the most
lucrative retail opportunities in the city and which could generate notable benefits
along the lines of development and social support if only government—itself
alternatively portrayed as oppressive and impotent—would allow hardworking,
industrious (and by implication, good Muslim) vendors to stay on the streets.
As I discuss in the following section, while spatial power is bound up in class
status and economic capacity, spatial and business practices associated with qat
vending often strategically draw on discursive frameworks ranging from discussions
of development and economic opportunity; to those of Islam and community; to
various debates over corruption and capitalist business ideals. The relatively heavy-
handed approach taken by the state and city toward this struggle over the politics of
the ground provides ample rhetorical ammunition for vendors to argue against state
policy, even when some of those policies may be justified. For instance, Abdullah
clarified that providing a right-of-way for ambulances in the narrow streets of the old
city was one of the main reasons why his market is being policed so stringently.

Engaging Development Discourse

The use of contingent and sometimes contradictory articulation strategies can be
further illustrated by responses to development-based criticisms of the industry,
as those who work with qat adopt a number of rhetorical tactics in which they
frame their work as one of the few economic options available—though this
option can be quite lucrative and not necessarily viable for those without access
to a certain minimum level of financial and social capital. Many then strategically
interweave this articulation with the claim that qat consumption and production are
ubiquitous among Yemenis, and hence central to Yemeni identity—“Yemenis are all
qat vendors” (Farmer 2)—with other rhetorical arguments. One vendor stressed to
me that:
most of the people are living and working with qat. Whether resident, or whether farmer,
or whether vendor, all of them benefit from qat. I think that if there is no qat Yemen
would have famines. Qat makes people live. I earn like 10,000 rial [daily] if I work with
qat, but if I sleep and don’t go to work, who will give me 10,000 rial? I might die of
hunger. But if you work and get some money you can go and come and do whatever
you want to do (Vendor 36).

Again, this rhetoric is usually linked with the hyperbolic claim that work in the
industry, and qat consumption more generally, is ubiquitous among Yemenis.
Another strategy for contesting state criticisms of qat consumption and production
is, unsurprisingly, criticizing the state itself: critiques like that from Abdullah in the
previous section are quite common. This criticism, however, usually presupposes
that the Yemeni state is relatively ineffectual when it comes to regulating daily life.
Far from fear of the overwhelming panoptic power exhibited by the neoliberal


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12 Antipode

development state as discussed in much development and governmentality

literature, most of those I interviewed acknowledged that while they complain about
the state this is usually done with the knowledge that there are clear limits to what
impacts it can actually affect. While many vendors used this rhetorical tactic, my
interviews with several qat farmers make the point most clear. Most of these farmers
also vend their qat on occasion, and farmers and vendors often have close ties
through familial or business networks. One in a village north of Sana’a expressed
this in a story about a state campaign to discourage qat agricultural production,
and how it failed in his village:

The government says that qat is bad for the economy, and [because of] the trees that
we grow . . . The government is always right [sarcastically] . . . they tried other things
[qat replacement programs], but there is not much benefit. Qat is much better for
us . . . No one agreed to work with the government . . . The government gave us talks on
other things. They would give us tools for water [management] if we grow something
else other than qat. The government said that if [farmers] would stop growing qat and
start growing something else they would support them (Farmer 15).

In fact, many farmers stressed that aside from the occasional media campaign
condemning qat (and charging what some viewed as exorbitant prices for electricity
and petroleum products), “the government doesn’t help and it doesn’t stop us
from farming it [qat]” (Farmer 3) such that “the government doesn’t deal with
us at all” (Farmer 10) or that “They don’t help, and they don’t hurt us” (Farmer
13). Even the media campaigns seem to have little impact on farming practices:
one farmer stressed that he simply doesn’t believe state arguments about qat, and
even if he did he is making too much money to be persuaded into switching crops
(Farmer 16).6
Many of those with whom I spoke seemed more concerned about other sources
of institutional pressure—like the extended family or various religious norms—than
with pressures from the state per se. For instance, many detailed the importance of
familial connection and obligation when entering the industry or for constructing
supply chains. It is fairly common for a single family to encompass the entirety of a
supply network from farm to retail market. Preserving familial reputation, and one’s
reputation within the family, is of central importance as family names can serve
as qat “brands”, and reputation can influence business relationship decisions. For
instance, one vendor explained how “I only trust people who are treated well by
their family. I can’t trust people that I don’t know very well or aren’t treated well or
are unreliable” (Vendor 57).
These engagements with the hegemony of the extended family in terms of
business practice often parallel articulations couched in discourses surrounding Islam
and community.7 There is, for example, the expectation that businesspeople are to
humor beggars (especially women), or the understanding that hiring workers (often
family members) when this is not the most economically efficient course of action
can be a form of zâkât, the social welfare tithe expected of Muslims. When one
qat farmer, for example, explained how most farmers share irrigation wells and
water management responsibilities, he described his business practice and religious
identity as intertwined to the point of indistinguishability: “Some people are sharing


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Performing Development in Street Markets 13

[wells] because most of them have spaces [farm plots] next to each other. People
who are not sharing, they can get help from other people—no difference . . .In Islam
you share” (Farmer 7). Even though it is often productive in constructing economic
relationships, engagement with Islamist rhetoric is not always egalitarian. Abdullah
pointed out that given the normative context surrounding Islamism and gendered
spaces and economies, “The only women that sell qat are bad women. In Yemen,
in Islam, when the woman goes to the market for men the people know that this
market is for men. So, the people think other things about the woman, that she is
not good.”
With these influences in mind and despite the anti-state attitudes described
earlier, another strategy for defending one’s work in the industry involves actually
engaging the frameworks used in critical representations of qat, by drawing
comparisons between hardworking, forward thinking qat producers and the
shiftless, unemployed, qat addicts who give the industry a bad reputation—largely
reiterating the state/World Bank assertion that qat culture leads to an “opportunity
cost of lost savings [due to addicted spendthrifts avoiding their religious obligations
to the family by wasting money on “drugs”] as well as lost work hours [because of
lazy workers]” (Republic of Yemen 2008:43). Indeed, one vendor told me:
For the farmers and the vendors and the other people that work with qat, qat is good
for them. Many families depend on qat for survival. If there was no qat many people
would be poor, so qat is good work. Qat is bad for people who don’t work and have no
money, but want qat (Vendor 42).

This tactic for justifying selling qat is often framed in terms of the contrast between
responsible vendors and an irresponsible subset of consumers:
A lot of people work with qat, it is good work . . . It’s not good, for example, for people
who don’t have much money. Some people will sell their things, their cell phone, and
their television, to buy qat. For these people it is bad. But for other people . . . For the
vendors, the people who work with qat, it is really good. If I spend all of my money on
qat I have nothing left for my family or children. If you don’t have money and good work
then you can’t chew qat (Vendor 1).

Thus, in parallel with development-based criticisms of qat culture, the lazy, family-
abusing, financially profligate qat addict (who incidentally is rather hard to find in
real life) provides a rhetorical backdrop against which good Muslim businesspeople
can be defined.
Defensive justifications of work in the industry are of course not universal.
Complaints about work in the trade revolve around lack of other opportunities.
For example, one vendor complained “Why am I doing this? Selling and buying
qat? Because jobs are not available in Yemen so what you do is that you try so hard
to find a job but you can’t, so you just go buy qat” (Vendor 64). Others seemed
most concerned that, given their relatively high levels of education, they should not
need to work as vendors. Two partners with university degrees in education and
pharmaceutical science linked their critique of qat production work back again to
the rhetorical strategies of criticizing the state and casting work with qat as an option
of last resort: “The government doesn’t accept educated people: it doesn’t matter
what you know, it’s who you know” (Vendors 51). It is important to interpret these


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14 Antipode

complaints, however, as strategic articulations rather than simply descriptions of

economic desperation: work with qat is less attractive than white collar employment,
but entering the industry still requires notable social and financial capital and can
be more lucrative than many other business ventures. For some the qat industry
provides an at least palatable substitute for employment and business opportunities
elsewhere, though for many, work in the industry is viewed as an attractive economic
option.
These preceding quotes point to the fairly obvious multiplicity in how qat vendors
struggle to articulate their work and spaces of work in ways most conducive to
engaging hegemonic socio-spatial positions. While debates over development are
often framed in terms of the qat industry (which is unsurprising given its prominence
in Yemen), and while rapid population growth and political instability are most
likely behind many of Yemen’s woes, several of those I interviewed clearly worried
about their long-term prospects for working in the industry. For instance, Abdullah
complained to me that he resented working with qat because the profit potential
of the work had encouraged him to leave school before graduating. During this
particular conversation, one of his former classmates was in the room, and Abdullah
drew comparisons between himself and his classmate. He conjectured that had he
continued his studies, he would have a stable and less physically demanding job,
which may or may not be the case for a Yemeni with few connections to government
or larger businesses. He now worries that as he ages the necessity to be in the market
every day will become problematic. Reliant on small-scale vending, he does not have
substantial savings and more or less lives day-to-day in financial terms. He pointed
out that his brother Sabri has a large operation, selling very high quality qat to
wealthy customers; Sabri has even been able to buy a house and establish savings.
Abdullah concluded, however, that the solution to his financial precarity lies not in
leaving the qat industry but rather in imitating his brother.

Conclusion
The case of qat vendors and their conflicts over street space points to broader
questions of urban development discourse, reiterating the importance of street
spaces and vending in urban economies of the global South. Their use of contingent
(and sometimes contradictory) strategic articulations of economic practices and
spaces allows qat vendors to produce and regulate their industry relative to
the broader socioeconomic demands associated with doing business in Yemen—
pertaining to ideas of familial obligation; Islam; or development, modernity, and
capitalisms. This was discussed both through an examination of the rhetorical
performances made by qat vendors, especially the ways in which they strategically
engage with development discourse, and by exploring the ways in which business
relationships are carried out in market space (thereby also producing it).
On a theoretical level, I have pointed to the utility of conceptualizing the
coproduction of hegemonic formations and governmentality processes (through
performativity). Hegemonic positions must be at least partially internalized to be
materialized. Governmentality implies the internalization of specific governance
ethe which are usually hegemonic, and stemming from a variety of sources. This


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Performing Development in Street Markets 15

conceptualization of hegemony and governmentality as intertwined complicates

understandings of both frameworks while elucidating one possible explanation
for how processes of governmentality operate in an economic context as actors
performatively engage with and produce various hegemonic formations of cultural
economic discourses, forms of knowledge, and economic spaces. Such a framework
expands the definition of actors capable of shaping conduct to include alternative
institutional and non-institutional actors, and explores possible impetuses for this
type of cultural economic governmentality: in this case, to articulate, engage with,
and possibly achieve socio-spatial hegemony in various street markets. That all of
this occurs against the backdrop of a relatively ineffectual state suggests the state so
often focused upon in governmentality-and-development literature is not the only,
or even the most salient, player in Yemeni contexts; nor is any one form of spatial
power dominant in the market spaces where members of the qat industry interact
with development discourse. Rather, various actors within and beyond the industry
vie for hegemonic positions by articulating themselves and the spaces in which
they do business via contingent, overlapping strategies in response to a variety of
institutional influences.
This more complex understanding of hegemonies and governmentalities
contributes to the empirical analysis of qat trade dynamics, given the specificities
of qat cultural economy in Yemen—the relative ineffectualness of the state and
the relative importance of other institutional sources of power like the family,
development institutions, particular capitalist arrangements, and Islam-informed
social systems. This discussion has implications for the study of urban economies
and politics more generally: alternate notions of hegemony and governmentality
point to the salience of alternative (and often more localized) hegemonies, while
empirically street markets and other retail spaces are often significant elements of
urban economies and political debates.

Acknowledgements
Fieldwork was funded by the Department of Geography and the Walker Institute for
International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina, and was sponsored by
the Research Center at the Yemen College of Middle East Studies. A special thanks to Wendy
Larner and three anonymous reviewers, as well as Jim Murphy, Chris van Dyke, and Ed Carr.
Any errors are my responsibility.

Endnotes
1
In focusing on a “drug” economy my point is not to exoticize the research context. While
representations of qat as dangerously exotic matter in the sense that they inform some
development and geopolitical policy, my purpose is to discuss a legal and socially sanctioned
cultural economy.
2
Most of my data come from and pertain to men, as the qat industry operates under Yemeni
norms regarding quite segregated gender relations. The gendering of qat merits an extensive
discussion, though concerns for brevity prevent me from providing it here.
3
My references to “networks” draw upon the extensive literature on networks and
embeddedness in economic geography and sociology (Grabher 2006; Granovetter 1985;
Hess 2004; Krippner and Alvarez 2007; Peck 2005). My intention, however, is not so much
to comment on networks as to simply reference them as one important mechanism through
which hegemonic relationships are constructed.


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16 Antipode

4
This argument draws theoretically on literature pertaining to the production of space
(Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; de Certeau 1984) and scale (Brenner 2001; Marston 2000; Marston
and Smith 2001).
5
Despite the fact that recent trends in neoliberal development theory have identified
“corruption” as a key detriment to development (Barro 1998; Mauro 1995, 2002; Murphy,
Shleifer and Vishny 1993; us Swalaheen 2007) I am hesitant to even use the term, as
what many economists identify as “corruption” incorporates a broad range of rentier and
patronage practices, not all of which may be simply dismissed as economically problematic.
Economic anthropologists like Elyachar (2005) have made this point, while Leff (1964) and
Houston (2007) have even used neoclassical economic frameworks to argue that “corruption”
can improve economic performance by increasing productivity incentives and allowing
businesspeople to circumvent restrictive policy. See Easterly (2002) for a discussion of the
various debates over corruption within (largely neoclassical) economic theory.
6
State influence over qat agriculture is increasing with the Ministry of Agriculture and
Irrigation “Groundwater and Soil Conservation Project”. I interviewed the director and an
engineer working for the project, who explained how it subsidizes the installation of more
efficient irrigation technologies in most of Yemen’s governorates. Simultaneously hampering
and facilitating project impact on qat is the World Bank—which provides roughly 65% of the
$79 million budget and requires that aid recipients do not grow qat on any of their land.
Given that qat accounted for a third of agricultural GDP in 2006 (Republic of Yemen 2008),
project participation rates are low.
7
The theological accuracy of these engagements with Islam is debatable. My point is simply
that when qat vendors discuss what it means to be a good, Muslim businessperson, and
subsequently conform—and expect others to conform—to those ideals, they are drawing on
discourses surrounding the religion.

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