Nathalie Peutz

New York University Abu Dhabi, Program in Arab Crossroads Studies, Faculty Member

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Nathalie Peutz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she teaches in the Arab Crossroads Studies Program. Her research focuses on forced migration, displacement and immobility, conservation and development, and identity and heritage in the Arab world and the Western Indian Ocean region.

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Books by Nathalie Peutz

Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen

Stanford University Press, 2018

Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse p... more Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state. Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution. Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots
claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.

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The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement. Edited by Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz

Duke University Press, 2010

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Papers by Nathalie Peutz

Temporal Violence, Durable Solutions, and the Anti-Refugee Machine

by Nathalie Peutz and Malay Firoz

Migration and Society, 2025

Incarnations of humanitarian-development policies linking refugee productivity and self-reliance ... more Incarnations of humanitarian-development policies linking refugee productivity and self-reliance in the Global South have circulated in the international aid sector for decades, but have reemerged in response to concerns about the refugee "crisis" in the Global North. Proponents have referred to these approaches as "incubation. " Focusing on Jordan, Lebanon, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, we juxtapose the success story told about incubation with the failure of these programs to secure rights and protections. We utilize a temporal analysis to raise questions about whose ends are ultimately achieved through these policies and argue that incubation fails at its stated objectives but succeeds as part of the Anti-Refugee Machine.

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Refugees like us Arab African encounters at a migratory crossroads

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2025

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Small Things

Migration, Displacement and Higher Education, Now What? eds. Brittany Murray, Matthew Brill-Carlat, Maria Höhn. Palgrave Macmillan, 279–293., 2023

How is Hassan?" a young Yemeni woman I'll call Heba asked me coyly, interrupting a conversation a... more How is Hassan?" a young Yemeni woman I'll call Heba asked me coyly, interrupting a conversation about the hardships she and other Yemeni refugees had experienced since the pandemic outbreak. 1 It was December 2021, during my first visit to the refugee camp in nearly two years. I was eager to learn about the impact of the coronavirus on my interlocutors' daily lives, their economic well-being, and their migratory plans. As in many communities the world over, some believed Covid-19 was a conspiracy, a distant threat, or a "Christian"/[alien] disease. Others described how "everyone" in the camp and at home in Yemen had suffered its symptoms. But amid our discussions of these and other grave developments, several Yemeni refugees I had come to know asked me explicitly about...

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Crisis as Preexisting Condition: Yemen Between Cholera, Coronavirus, and Starvation.

In: Pandemic Exposures: Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus, eds. Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade. Chicago: Hau Books, 2021

On May 20, 2020, a Yemeni woman living near Aden noti ed me that she and her daughter had contrac... more On May 20, 2020, a Yemeni woman living near Aden noti ed me that she and her daughter had contracted the "virus." Accompanying Salma's WhatsApp message were photographs of her COVID-stricken daughter and of her own right hand bandaged with an intravenous cannula, evidence that she had received medical treatment of some kind. An unknown number of COVID-in icted persons in Yemen have not been and will not be as fortunate as Salma and her daughter were. Even before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in Yemen, the country's health facilities were gutted. More than ve years of armed con ict, economic collapse, water scarcity, and a population weakened by hunger and disease had set the stage for the novel coronavirus to explode. Salma later told me that nearly everyone in her family had been infected. Su ering from high fevers and extreme exhaustion, they self-administered intravenous uids that her medically connected brother had purchased from a pharmacy. Hospitals were turning people away. In their neighborhood,

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“The Fault of Our Grandfathers": Yemen's Third-Generation Migrants Seeking Refuge from Displacement

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2019

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Djibouti's Markazi camp for refugees from Yemen bet... more Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Djibouti's Markazi camp for refugees from Yemen between 2016 and 2018, this article examines the complex motivating factors that drove a subset of Yemenis to seek refuge in the Horn of Africa. Although the primary reason for their flight to the Horn of Africa was the ongoing war, a secondary but not inconsequential driver of many of these Yemeni refugees’ current displacement was their family histories of transnational migrations and interethnic marriages. This article argues that, for this group, it was their “mixed” (muwallad) Arab and African parentage and resulting alienation in Yemen that made their flight imaginable—and, in their view, imperative. Although “mixed motive migration” is not unusual, this example underscores how spatial and social (im)mobilities in Yemen and the Horn of Africa region have been co-constituted across generations. More importantly, it has critical implications for the recently adopted Global Compact on Refugees, which promotes (among other solutions) the “local integration” of refugees in their proximate host societies.

Heritage in (the) Ruins

International Journal Middle East Studies, 2017

Targeted Women and Barred Development in Soqotra, Yemen

Arabian Humanities, Mar 2013

Revolution in Socotra: A Perspective from Yemen's Periphery

Middle East Report, May 2012

A t the beginning of , as Egyptians and Syrians marked the second year of their revolts, prot... more A t the beginning of , as Egyptians and Syrians marked the second year of their revolts, protesters also took to the streets of Hadiboh, the tumbledown capital of Yemen's Socotra archipelago (pop. approx. ,). Like demonstrators elsewhere, the Socotrans were calling for both local administrative change and national political reform. While the Socotran protests, occurring since March , were small, they were no less significant than the more spectacular rallies in the epicenters of Arab revolution. Indeed, the spread of revolution to Socotra, the largest and most populated of the archipelago's four islands, shows the extent to which the events of  have resonated even at the very margins of the Arab world.

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Bedouin abjection: World heritage, worldliness, and worthiness at the margins of Arabia

American Ethnologist, May 1, 2011

"Shall I Tell You What Soqotra Once Was?" World Heritage and Sovereign Nostalgia in Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago

Transcontinentales, Nov 2011

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“Voulez-vous que je vous raconte la Socotra d’autrefois?” Patrimoine mondial et nostalgie souveraine dans l’archipel de Socotra au Yémen

Transcontinentales, Nov 2011

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Reorienting Heritage: Poetic Exchanges between Suqutra and the Gulf

Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la …, Jan 1, 2008

Deux faits historiques qui ont eu pour théâtre l'île yéménite de Suqu †ra -à savoir la conquête d... more Deux faits historiques qui ont eu pour théâtre l'île yéménite de Suqu †ra -à savoir la conquête de l'île par des « chrétiens » au IX e siècle et l'exécution de membres de l'élite suqu †rie en 1974 -trouvent aujourd'hui un sens comme élément des joutes poétiques entre insulaires et expatriés suqu †ris dans les pays du Golfe. À travers ces poèmes et le contexte de leur diffusion transnationale, la Diaspora suqu †rie rivalise pour démontrer son aptitude à définir un patrimoine suqu †ri au moment même où des acteurs locaux, nationaux et internationaux font valoir ce même droit par des revendications rivales. Cet article traite de quelques-unes des manières par lesquelles un héritage suqu †ri est revendiqué et ce que cela implique dans la définition d'une identité suqu †rie.

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