Environmental disasters in recent decades have drawn scholarly attention to the need to move beyond traditional area studies boundaries in order to understand the wide-reaching impacts of events like tsunamis, cyclones, and, more broadly, climate change. This essay reflects on the efforts of one research team, led by Nathalie Peutz and Alden Young, to disrupt regional divides between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and to study climate change across the littoral states of the Red Sea arena. As the authors highlight, successful collaboration across regions and in this time of multiple crises entails the constant negotiation of constraints and disruptions.
Nathalie Peutz
Nathalie Peutz is associate professor of Arab Crossroads studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. A cultural anthropologist, Peutz has conducted wide-ranging ethnographic research in Yemen, Djibouti, and Somaliland. She is the author of Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press, 2018) and coeditor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (with Nicholas De Genova; Duke University Press, 2010). Peutz was 2001 fellow of the SSRC’s International Predissertation Fellowship program and 2020 Planning Grant recipient of the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean.
Latest posts
10 Years after the Arab Spring
Free Citizen to Real Refugee: Yemeni Minorities at the Margins in 2011 and 2021
by Nathalie PeutzA decade after the 2011 Yemeni revolution, Yemen enters its seventh year in a civil-and-proxy war that has caused a severe humanitarian crisis with millions of Yemenis suffering from famine, facing internal displacement, and depending on humanitarian aid. In this essay, Nathalie Peutz reflects on the changing desires of marginalized Yemenis who, during the revolution, had protested for full citizenship rights, but now in wartime seek refugee status. As refugees describe experiencing more rights in camps than they once had in Yemen, Peutz argues that “refugee” has transformed into an ascendant status, capturing the “hopes and disappointments” of postrevolution Yemen.
December 7, 2021