14/05/2026
Don't miss this book talk - Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity: Internally Displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan by Dr Houman Oliaei, co-hosted by the Refugee Studies Centre and the Middle East Centre.
📍MEC Boardroom, Kirdar Building, St Antony's College, Oxford
📅 5.30pm-7pm, 18 May 2026
Registration is not required
This book draws on research among displaced Yazidis in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, tracing how they navigate the contradictions of internal displacement. Dr 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.
Praise for this book:
"Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity has the potential to raise awareness of what Iraq looks like in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, US intervention, and ISIS. . . . [Oliaei] makes an important contribution by thinking about an unusual population that is actually thwarted by their citizenship.
~Rose Wellman, author of Feeding Iran: Shii Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic
