Maritime Disruption in Yemen: The Making of a Hybrid Red Sea Order

Since late 2023, Houthi forces in Yemen have employed drones and missiles to disrupt commercial shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, necessitating global rerouting and prompting multilateral naval responses. These events challenge the conventional view that the land domain is fragmented and prone to conflict, while the maritime domain is cooperative and regime-governed. To explain the developments in Yemen, this article applies regional security complex theory, arguing that the Red Sea is evolving into a hybrid security complex where land- and sea-based threats, actors, and logics are converging. The analysis of the Yemeni case demonstrates how the combination of cross-border rivalries and territorial control by insurgents can enable the projection of force into maritime spaces, undermining global shipping and security. In the absence of progress on land-based governance, maritime insecurity is likely to compel external stakeholders to oscillate between temporary trade-protection measures and longer-term political stabilization efforts. The analysis highlights the need for integrated, cross-domain approaches to regional security that address the interplay of nonstate actors, infrastructural vulnerabilities, and geopolitical competition shaping the emerging Red Sea order.