The Temporal Politics of Erasure: Humanitarianism, Expulsive Carcerality, and the Displacement of Iraqi Yazidis
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the governance of Iraqi Yazidi displacement through an analysis of the Jiyan camp (pseudonym) in Iraqi Kurdistan following the 2014 genocide. I demonstrate how humanitarian infrastructure designed to shelter genocide survivors paradoxically functioned as a mechanism for their further displacement. The camp embodied what I term ‘expulsive carcerality’, where humanitarian actors and state authorities weaponised impermanence through deteriorating tents, prohibited construction materials, and surveillance systems that rendered life systematically untenable. Expulsive carcerality inverts carceral logic by using confinement not to immobilise but to ultimately expel, creating a temporal politics where humanitarian care transforms into a slow eviction notice. Authorities engineered material precarity and temporal suspension, pushing Yazidis towards ‘voluntary return’ to devastated homelands or precarious urban margins. This manufactured uninhabitability ultimately served to resolve the political rupture of genocide not through justice, but by erasing the camp and scattering its residents, rendering Yazidi suffering once again invisible.
Source: Ethnos
Author: Houman Oliaei
Institution: Babson College
Language: English
Topic: Migration and Exile Studies
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Brandeis University
OpenAlex ID: W4413010789