Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity: Internally Displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan

After the 2014 ISIS genocide, hundreds of thousands of Iraq's Yazidi minority were forced to flee their ancestral homeland in Sinjar. While global attention focuses on refugees crossing international borders, the Yazidis' experience represents a less visible yet more common face of displacement -- those forced from their homes but confined within national boundaries as internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Drawing on ethnographic research in an IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity examines how Yazidis navigate the lived contradictions of internal displacement: they are citizens of a state that failed to protect them, yet that very citizenship now prevents them from seeking safety elsewhere. Author Houman Oliaei shows how internal displacement creates a paradox of protection, where international institutions view IDPs as too much like citizens to warrant protection, while governments see them as too displaced to recognize them as full citizens. In this interstitial space, Yazidis are hyper-visible as victims but erased as political subjects. The Yazidis' struggles for recognition illuminate how humanitarian governance within state borders transforms displacement into a technology of control, creating overlapping forms of liminality--legal, spatial, and temporal--that suspend displaced citizens in a permanent state of provisional existence. They remain caught between formal citizenship and humanitarian assistance, confined to camps that weaponize impermanence to expel their residents and suspended between a traumatic past and a future they cannot securely claim.

Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity demonstrates how internal displacement has evolved from an emergency requiring a response into systematic political dispossession. States maintain sovereignty over populations they have effectively abandoned, while humanitarian institutions transform citizens into objects of care stripped of political rights.