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.

First-time European and American visitors to the United Arab Emirates, where I live, are often surprised by the prevalence of heritage villages, festivals, and sports in hypermodern Abu Dhabi and Dubai. “Heritage” in the Arab Gulf, as elsewhere in the Middle East, is a central and growing industry, attracting the attention of scholars as well as investors and tourists. At the same time, much of the region's—and the world's—invaluable cultural heritage has been and continues to be obliterated by insurgents and governments alike. Spectacular assaults on historical sites, cultural institutions, and symbols of cultural-religious diversity in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Yemen demonstrate that the “new wars” of the 21st century are being fought on the terrain of cultural heritage as much as they are over other precious resources. And yet, the interconnections between this heritage construction and destruction remain underexplored. In much of the scholarship produced in the burgeoning field of critical heritage studies, the duplexity of these processes is ignored. Instead, most edited volumes and “global” analyses of the field look to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority nations only in so far as they present case studies of heritage destruction—the bombing of the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and the looting of the National Museum of Iraq being iconic examples.