Houman Oliaei
Houman Oliaei is a political and legal anthropologist and an assistant professor of anthropology at Babson College. His work focuses on borders and displacement, and on the relationship between humanitarianism, citizenship, and the state.
His current research follows migrants and asylum seekers from beyond the Americas at the US–Mexico border. It looks at how changes in immigration law and deportation policy are reshaping what remains of humanitarian protection.
His first book, Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity (Indiana University Press, 2026), is an ethnography of Yezidis displaced within Iraq after the Islamic State’s attacks in 2014, caught between their rights as citizens and their reliance on humanitarian aid.
Research interests: political and legal anthropology, borders and deportation, humanitarianism, citizenship and the state, forced migration and internal displacement, and Middle East studies.
Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity
Internally Displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan
After ISIS’s 2014 genocide, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis fled Sinjar, their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq. This book traces how they navigate the contradictions of internal displacement—caught between formal citizenship and humanitarian aid, and suspended between a traumatic past and a future they cannot securely claim.
A critical and valuable contribution to the blossoming literature on the Yezidis as well as the established literatures on humanitarianism and asylum politics.
