Ripensare la migrazione di ritorno: esperienze vissute e regimi di mobilità in trasformazione - Rethinking Return Migration: Lived Experiences and Shifting Mobility Regimes

Abstract

The contemporary increase in return migration provides a critical vantage point from which to interrogate the exclusionary logics underpinning current migration governance. Against this backdrop, this special issue examines how the notion of return has been mobilized politically and analytically over time. A review of the literature reveals a marked evolution in scholarly approaches: early work was shaped by skeptical and assimilationist assumptions; this was followed, in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, by a focus on the transnational migration- development nexus. In the past decade, research has increasingly connected both forced removals and state-sponsored “voluntary” returns to broader processes of border externalization and the consolidation of securitization agendas. An anthropological perspective is essential for developing a nuanced, multi-layered understanding of return migration. It brings into view the ambivalent, often contradictory processes unfolding from below that shape return trajectories. By foregrounding these situated experiences, an ethnographic lens helps dismantle dominant political narratives that portray return as an abstract, individualized, and ostensibly unproblematic indicator of success.