Gate of Tears: Migration and Impasse in Yemen and the Horn of Africa

In her Academy project, Peutz examines the ramifications of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Global Compact on Refugees in an era of gated nations and shrinking humanitarian spaces. Based on ethnographic research in a Yemeni refugee camp in Djibouti between 2016 and 2020, the book analyses a complex set of displacements in a geopolitically-sensitive region where encamped Yemeni refugees come into direct daily contact with Ethiopian migrants walking toward Yemen. Since March 2015, millions of Yemenis have been suffering from malnutrition, hunger, disease epidemics, and critical shortages of medicines, fuel, and clean water—a situation widely considered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis caused by human activity. As many as three million Yemenis have been internally displaced, and another 190,000 people have sought refuge in neighboring countries, including Djibouti, now host to the world’s tenth largest number of refugees relative to its national population. With its narrowest crossing thirty kilometers across the Red Sea from Yemen, Djibouti has received nearly 40,000 individuals from Yemen since 2015. Meanwhile, thousands of young Ethiopian migrants continue to walk across Djibouti to disembark on their own perilous sea crossings to Yemen, with the intent of reaching Saudi Arabia and finding work. In 2018, approximately 160,000 East African migrants crossed the Red Sea and entered war-torn Yemen, exceeding the number of migrants (144,000) who entered Europe via the Mediterranean Sea the same year. In this precarious climate, where “Arab” refugees are effectively held captive while “African” migrants are abandoned, the Compact reads less like a global commitment than it does a continuation of Southern captivity and Northern abandonment. Peutz’s project brings vital refugee voices and historical experiences to bear on these new developments in refugee and migration governance and contributes to academic debates on humanitarianism, captivity and immobility, social integration, and social abandonment.