Refugee repatriation and ongoing transnationalisms

Abstract

Transnationalism has proven to be a productive lens with which to engage a wide variety of interconnected factors and outcomes of border-crossing – from the economic to the affective – in an increasingly interconnected world. While the focus in many studies of transnationalism has largely been on voluntary and/or economic migrants, or even on transnational corporations or elite capitalist classes, even cursory attention to world news over the past few years makes it clear that many, many other people are on the move for diverse reasons. While the distinction between voluntary and forced migration is contested and unclear in many contexts, it is not disputed that many people are compelled to move across borders for reasons related directly to survival (Betts, 2013). The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has called the current state of forced displacement “unprecedented” in scope and scale, including the number of people it classifies as “refugees” (UNHCR, 2015). As migrant journeys receive more media coverage, increasing attention is also being paid to the ways refugees stay in touch with those who have not yet left, or cannot leave, the places they themselves have left behind. Such ties across borders continue when some refugees are, finally, able to return “home,” but little attention has yet explored the trajectories of transnationalisms of refugees and migrants who return or are repatriated to their “countries of origin.” The transnationalism of refugees has not gone unremarked by geographers and other social scientists theorizing transnationalism, even before the current media attention, and in recent years scholars have proposed and taken up transnationalism as a useful conceptual tool for theorizing the cross-border movements and ties of forced migrants (Bailey, Wright, Mountz, & Miyares, 2002; Hyndman, 2010; Nolin, 2006). The application of such a transnational lens to the study of the experience of refugees has productively shed light on transnationalisms marked not only by flows, movement, and connections but also by ruptures and sutures, waiting and immobilities. Both research on migrant transnationalisms and emerging research focusing specifically on refugee transnationalisms have tended to focus on diasporic communities, and the transnational networks and practices of those who have left their countries of origin, with close connections to both migration studies and refugee studies respectively (Dwyer, 2001). A significant gap in this literature is due to its continued assumption that refugee mobilities are unidirectional, and across long distances. Only a few scholars are attentive to the ongoing transnationalisms of refugees who return to their countries of origin (Bakewell, 2000; Fresia, 2014; Olivier-Mensah & Scholl-Schneider, 2016).