Evanston Public Library and Northwestern University’s Middle East and North Africa program (MENA) present talks on the culture, politics, religion, and society of the Middle East and North Africa.
The conflict in Yemen has precipitated what many consider to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. However, despite cholera epidemics, widespread hunger, and unprecedented displacement within Yemen, the numbers of Yemenis who have left the country to seek refugee status abroad are relatively low. Today, roughly 1,000 of these Yemeni refugees reside in Djibouti’s Markazi camp, where they interact on a daily basis with Ethiopian migrants walking toward Yemen. This talk provides an overview of the current situation of Yemeni refugees in the Horn of Africa, analyzing a complex set of displacements in a geopolitically-sensitive region where “Arab” refugees are effectively held captive while “African” migrants are effectively abandoned. This case study illuminates some of the ramifications of the UN’s new Global Compact on Refugees.
Nathalie Peutz is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on forced migration, displacement and immobility, conservation and development, and identity and heritage in the Arab world and the Western Indian Ocean region. Her publications include Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press, 2018) and a co-edited volume, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (with Nicholas De Genova, Duke University Press, 2010). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Gate of Tears: Migration and Impasse in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, based on her ethnographic fieldwork with Yemeni migrant and refugee communities in the Horn of Africa. She is a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies (2019-2020).
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