DECENTERING THE STUDY OF COERCED RETURN

Call for papers for a special issue proposal for Migration Studies:

Guest editors:

Zeynep Mencütek – Senior Researcher at Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies, Germany – zeynep.mencutek@bicc.de

Nora Stel – Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands – nora.stel@ru.nl

Marieke van Houte – Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands – marieke.vanhoute@ru.nl

Aims and scope:

In the global policy discourse on humanitarian migrants, return has become the preferred ‘durable solution.’ Since the vast majority of migrants and refugees move and reside in and among countries in the immediate region of their origin countries, return migration will also predominantly take place within the region of countries in crisis. Yet, scholarly concerns have overwhelmingly focused on the minority of migrants who travelled further afield, in particular to the European Union, and return from there to their regions of origin. Relatively little attention has been given to return policies and practices of neighboring receiving states in the Global South.

Disregarding this regional dimension puts a Eurocentric bias on the study of return migration governance. Regional return governance, moreover, both shapes and is shaped by the externalization and return migration policies of the EU. On the one hand, the EU’s deterrence and externalization ‘partnerships’ fundamentally affect return diplomacies, infrastructures, and trajectories in its neighbouring regions. On the other hand, the governance of regional returns has repercussions for the migration dynamics the EU seeks to control, for its engagement with ‘third countries,’ and for the international norms it claims to uphold.

Taking a critical and decentering approach to migration studies, this special issue partly draws on extensive empirical work conducted in the context of the Horizon Europe GAPs project and presented at a panel IMISCOE’s 2024 annual conference and puts this in conversation with other scholarship on this crucial theme. We are therefore specifically looking for papers that complement our project’s case-studies on returns from Lebanon and Türkiye to Syria and from Türkiye and Iran to Afghanistan.

We invite prospective papers in this panel to engage with four core sets of questions:

1. What might be distinctive characteristics of regional return migration and its governance in the EU’s neighborhood?

  • What types of return (on the continuums of individual/collective and voluntary/forced) are dominant in South-to-South returns?

  • How are these types of return respectively governed in terms of both policy (laws and agreements) and practice (implementation and contestation) and considering both formal and informal infrastructures and diplomacies?

  • How do people on the move navigate such return migration policies and practices? How do they contest coerced return migration governance?

2. What are the main drivers of regional return migration governance in the EU’s neighborhood?

  • How can we make sense of the interacting and multi-scalar domestic and regional motives for coercing, regulating, and controlling return?

  • In what ways do issues related to capacity and political will and to inter- and intra-regional geopolitics shape return migration governance in the EU’s neighborhood?

3. What are the consequences of regional return migration governance in the EU’s neighborhood?

  • How do particular characteristics and drivers shape the human rights dimensions of return? What are implications for protection and non-refoulement?

  • What are the relevant temporal dimensions and multi-directionality of mobility to consider regarding regional return migration governance?

4. What are the distinct methodological and analytical challenges and innovations related to the study of coerced return migration in the EU’s neighborhood?

  • What epistemological and ontological perspectives on migration governance can help to explicate and understand the specificities of coerced return in the EU’s neighborhood?

  • Which reflexivities and positionalities might be particularly relevant to make sense of coerced return migration in the Global South? What are relevant insights in terms of (obstacles to) access and (absence of) data?

  • How can pertinent theories and concepts on return migration be leveraged across different geographies in the Global South and North?

Submission guidelines:

Please share your extended abstract (400-500 words) as well as a bio note (of maximum 200 words) to Nora Stel at nora.stel@ru.nl before 15 September 2024.

Please make sure your abstract explicitly situates its contributions in relation to the core themes and key questions specified in this call.

If our special issue proposal is expected, first drafts of papers are expected by Spring 2025, final drafts by Autumn 2025.

Any questions you might have can be directed to Zeynep Mencütek (at zeynep.mencutek@bicc.de)

Marieke van Houte (at marieke.vanhoute@ru.nl) and Nora Stel (at nora.stel@ru.nl).