Il coraggio dell’altrove e il coraggio del restare: retoriche, ambiguità e contraddizioni nei programmi AVRR dell’OIM e nei ritorni migranti a Vélingara - The courage to pursue the elsewhere and the courage to stay: rhetorics, ambiguities and contradictions in IOM’s AVRR programmes and unsuccessful migrant return trajectories in Vélingara

Abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the southern Senegalese city of Vélingara examines the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programmes promoted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as an ostensibly replicable model of mobility management (modèle voyageur). These programmes function as propaganda mechanisms that discredit the image of the “irregular” migrant while simultaneously valorizing the local, community-rooted micro-entrepreneur. Central to this process is the “deportation twist”: AVRR interventions reframe forced return as a positive, even empowering experience. However, this rhetoric often obscures the persistence, upon return, of the very economic and social challenges that drove the initial migration.
In Vélingara, institutional discourses on reintegration, which propose the ideal of the “rooted entrepreneur,” intersect with the narratives of returned migrants who emphasize the courage required for the migration “adventure.” The myth of “sedentarized happiness” that the IOM has promoted in Senegal since 2016 acts as a form of “enforced rootedness” that places the full responsibility for failed mobility attempts onto individuals, thereby obscuring the structural inequalities that initially compelled them to move. The “deportation twist” ultimately exposes a deeper injustice: the pursuit of happiness is recognized as legitimate, but only when it does not involve a free and human-centered form of mobility. Ultimately, the AVRR model promotes a consensus-driven narrative rather than genuinely challenging the inequalities that drive mobility.