For more than three months in 2016, Kuwait hosted the most serious attempt yet to end Yemen’s war. The talks were brokered by the UN. When they stalled, Kuwait’s late emir intervened personally to keep the delegations at the table. By August, the talks had collapsed. The parties did not fall out over whether to make peace. They fell out over what should come first: the Houthis withdrawing from cities and handing over heavy weapons or the formation of a new government that included them.

Ten years on, the question is back. Last month, UN envoy Hans Grundberg warned that Yemen had returned to “full-scale war.” Houthi missiles are aimed at Saudi airports and energy facilities. When talks resume, as they eventually must, the hardest issue will be the one that sank those in Kuwait: who moves first?

A peace agreement is a contract between warring parties. Each side fears that if it acts first, the other will pocket the concession and walk away. Lawyers know this problem well. Contract law solves it with conditions and simultaneous performance. Peace agreements need the same discipline: phased steps, each tied to a verifiable action by the other side.

The UN Security Council has already set a baseline. Resolution 2216 of 2015 demands that the Houthis withdraw from the areas they seized, relinquish the weapons they took from state institutions, and return to a political process. Riyadh’s insistence on that order is often described as maximalism. It is not. It is the position of the UNSC, adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Critics argue that Resolution 2216 is outdated, since the Houthis have controlled Sanaa for more than a decade. There is something in that. But a UNSC resolution can be updated by the council — it cannot simply be ignored by negotiators. The task is to phase its logic, not to abandon it.

Deliberate strikes on civilian airports and energy infrastructure are serious violations of international humanitarian law. 

Dr. Bashayer Al-Majed

Yemen has already shown what happens when drafting is left vague. The Stockholm Agreement of 2018 was hailed as a breakthrough. But its wording on who would control the port of Hodeidah after redeployment was loose enough for each side to claim it had won. Implementation stalled for years.

Diplomats call this constructive ambiguity. It works in communiques. In ceasefires, it buys a signature and sells the peace. Every clause that can be read two ways becomes the next battlefield.

From a legal perspective, four elements matter most. First, sequencing that is phased and verifiable: heavy weapons placed under monitoring in exchange for staged political inclusion, with each step unlocking the next.

Second, independent verification with a real mandate. Monitors that can observe but not report are decoration.

Third, a UNSC resolution endorsing the final agreement. That would make its terms binding under international law and tie any breach to sanctions.

Fourth, accountability for attacks on civilians. Deliberate strikes on civilian airports and energy infrastructure are serious violations of international humanitarian law. Blanket amnesties for such acts are increasingly hard to defend in international law and they store up grievances for the next war.

Here, the Gulf has a precedent of its own. After the Iraqi invasion of 1990, the UN Compensation Commission paid Kuwait more than $52 billion in reparations, with the final payment made in 2022. It remains one of the most complete postwar compensation schemes in modern history. A claims mechanism for victims of attacks on Saudi civilian infrastructure would follow that model.

Kuwait is not neutral in this conflict. Under the Gulf’s joint defense agreement, it stands with Saudi Arabia — and it should. But it brings two things to any future process. It has the institutional memory of 2016: what was offered, where the talks broke down and why. And it has lived through the full legal arc of a war’s aftermath, from UNSC resolutions to reparations paid in full. Few states can say that.

That experience points to a simple lesson. Goodwill gets parties into a room. Drafting decides whether they stay at peace once they leave it.

Saudi Arabia has shown, through its direct talks with the Houthis in 2023 and its restraint since, that it is willing to negotiate. The Houthis’ choice of missiles over talks says more about them than about Riyadh. But when the table is set again, the outcome will not turn on who shows up. It will turn on the order of play. Yemen’s war will end with a signature. Whether the peace lasts will depend on which clause comes first.

  • Dr. Bashayer Al-Majed is a professor of law at Kuwait University, and a visiting fellow at Oxford.

X: @BashayerAlMajed