Settling in Hypermobility – Yemeni Humanitarian Sojourner Status Persons in South Korea’s Refugee Regime and Beyond

The arrival of 561 Yemenis fleeing from Yemen civil war on Jeju Island in 2018 has shaped the refugee issue visible in South Korea first time. The unexpected influx provoked intense backlashes, stigmatizing them as fake refugees, and especially sex criminals who would harm Korean women. Aligned with critical refugee scholarship, my research challenges the long-standing binary of forced displacement/voluntary migration, exploring the layered and often overlooked experiences of Yemeni refugees, more precisely humanitarian sojourner status persons, in South Korea and beyond. Grounded in the three-year ethnographic fieldwork between 2019 and 2024, the study unpacks how Yemeni humanitarian sojourner status persons leverage tremendous mobilities, while interrogating how South Korea’s refugee regime ‘interestingly’ and ‘cleverly’ settles them in hypermobility. This modality of governmentality is different from displacement, exploiting Yemenis’ dreams and capabilities, and rendering them humanitarian surplus population. As the first longitudinal research on Yemeni refugees, the study highlights a refugee reception experience beyond the dichotomy of the Global North and Global South, offering an opportunity to transcend multiple binaries that structure the complex terrain of refugee migration.

 

 

Yura Hyeon recently completed her PhD dissertation on “Settling in Hypermobility – Yemeni Humanitarian Sojourner Status Persons in South Korea’s Refugee Regime and Beyond” in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Münster. She has studied literature, media, and public policy and administration with an East Asian regional focus in Seoul, Hangzhou, and Berlin. Her current book project examines how the Yemenis’ sub-refugee legal status of the South Korea’s and global refugee regimes shapes their hypermobile, flexible, and exploitable lives. She has works published in outlets such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Her interdisciplinary and migratory background has continually shaped her positionality on the periphery as a migrant, fueling her motivation for her research project on how ‘temporary’ status refugees create membership across Asia.