This chapter explores the gendered aspects of return migration as part of the EU-MENA migration governance landscape. Although return migration has been an escalating core component of EU external migration policy, it is usually considered a neutral or technocratic process removed from migrants’ everyday lives and the power relations underpinning mobility. Drawing on migration research and insights from ethnographic field research with experts and women returnees in Morocco and Tunisia, the chapter critically analyzes how return could be seen as a policy tool to regionalize mobility control and constitute new gendered orders across the EU-MENA axis. Institutional approaches to return tend to erase women’s voices and embodied experiences or represent them within limiting stereotypes of vulnerability and passivity. Women, though, return in multiple modes of agency, resilience, and resistance—be it voluntary, forced, or negotiated return. By centering on women’s voices, the chapter reveals the exclusions and contradictions of current return schemes and outlines other imaginaries of mobility, belonging, and justice. The chapter concludes by making a case for return migration governance that is sensitive to the intersectional realities of returnees and subverts the regional hierarchies that underpin current EU-MENA migration policies.

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Regionalizing Return

  • Stellamarina Donato,
  • Umberto Di Maggio

摘要

This chapter explores the gendered aspects of return migration as part of the EU-MENA migration governance landscape. Although return migration has been an escalating core component of EU external migration policy, it is usually considered a neutral or technocratic process removed from migrants’ everyday lives and the power relations underpinning mobility. Drawing on migration research and insights from ethnographic field research with experts and women returnees in Morocco and Tunisia, the chapter critically analyzes how return could be seen as a policy tool to regionalize mobility control and constitute new gendered orders across the EU-MENA axis. Institutional approaches to return tend to erase women’s voices and embodied experiences or represent them within limiting stereotypes of vulnerability and passivity. Women, though, return in multiple modes of agency, resilience, and resistance—be it voluntary, forced, or negotiated return. By centering on women’s voices, the chapter reveals the exclusions and contradictions of current return schemes and outlines other imaginaries of mobility, belonging, and justice. The chapter concludes by making a case for return migration governance that is sensitive to the intersectional realities of returnees and subverts the regional hierarchies that underpin current EU-MENA migration policies.