Lecture | Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series
If You Encounter Strife, Return to Yemen
- Nathalie Peutz (NYU Abu Dhabi)
- Date
- Monday 28 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series
- Address
- Online via Zoom (register below)
One of the central “problems” encountered by the refugee hosting regime in Djibouti is that the Yemeni refugees do not stay put. Contrary to the UNHCR imaginary of an organized, sustainable repatriation guided by an array of stakeholders, many refugees have returned to Yemen on their own accord and others visit Yemen on a regular basis. Given the risk of returning to Yemen, not just in terms of personal safety, but also in terms of maintaining one’s refugee status, why do so many people return?
This talk details the various ways in which Markazi residents move back and forth between the camp and Yemen and investigates what their doing so suggests about the UNHCR’s renewed emphasis on local integration. We learn that many refugees self-repatriated because they were lured back by the promise of Gulf State assistance or they gave up on the international refugee regime, insisting that there was “no future” in Djibouti for them or their children. Some returned indefinitely to pursue university studies, to join the army, or to marry. These refugees’ ability to envision, secure, and produce “a future” seemed more viable to them in war-torn Yemen than it did in their place of refuge.
Yet, the stakes of these returns, particularly for young men, can be lethal, with some having died after they were conscripted into the war. Meanwhile, even those intent on retaining their refugee status visit Yemen periodically to attend funerals and weddings, check on relatives and assets, buy merchandise for their camp-based businesses, seek medical procedures, or to flee boredom. The talk thus complexifies our understanding of refugees, demonstrating how the ambiguity of resettlement programs and camp life often pushes refugees to return to the very places from which they fled. In doing so, it sheds light on the problem of integration—rather than return—and the unen-durable solutions embedded in the UN’s Global Compact on Refugees.
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About the speaker
Nathalie Peutz is a cultural anthropologist at NYU 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. She is the author of Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford, 2018) and co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (with Nicholas De Genova, Duke , 2010).
The Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series is supported by the Horizon-2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project EMStaD YEMEN.
An overview of all events in this series can be found on the series page.