In this joint Refugee Studies Centre and Middle East Centre seminar, Dr Houman Oliaei discusses his new book. Chaired by Professor Pascal Menoret (Magdalen College).
After ISIS's 2014 genocide, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis fled Sinjar, their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq. Most stayed within Iraq's borders, settling in camps and informal settlements in the Kurdistan Region. While global attention often focuses on refugees who cross international borders, the Yazidis' experience exemplifies a far more common but less visible form of displacement: people forced from their homes yet remaining inside their own country as internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Drawing on research among displaced Yazidis in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity traces how they navigate the contradictions of internal displacement. Author Houman Oliaei shows how this produces a paradox of protection: international actors treat IDPs as too much like citizens to merit intervention, while governments deem them too displaced to be recognized as full citizens. In this interstitial space, Yazidis become hypervisible as victims but erased as political subjects. They are caught between formal citizenship and humanitarian aid, suspended between a traumatic past and a future they cannot securely claim, and confined to camps that weaponize impermanence to manage and eventually expel their residents.
Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity argues that internal displacement today is not just a humanitarian problem but a political project of dispossession. States maintain sovereignty over populations they have effectively abandoned, while humanitarian institutions transform citizens into objects of care stripped of their political rights.
Published by Indiana University Press in 2026: https://iupress.org/9780253075604/yazidis-on-the-margins-of-humanity/
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Houman Oliaei is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Babson College. His first book, Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity: Internally Displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan (Indiana University Press, 2026), offers an ethnographic account of Yazidi displacement in post-conflict Iraq, examining humanitarian governance, political recognition, and belonging in the aftermath of the 2014 ISIS genocide. His broader research engages questions of humanitarianism, citizenship, forced migration, and mobility across the Middle East and beyond.
