Return Two-day Workshop: An idea, practice, and contested horizon

Key information

Date: 17 – 18 October 2025

Time: Day 1: 5:30 pm

Day 2: 1:00 pm & 5:00 pm

Venue: SOAS University of London

*Note that details are subject to change as they become finalised. Please watch this space for the most up-to-date information.

About

The Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (CMDS) hosts a two-day workshop exploring the concept and practices of ‘return’. Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners, the event will critically engage with Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to leave and return to one’s country, and examine how repressive border regimes shape the return projects of refugees and migrants.

Focusing on the multiple temporalities and spaces constitutive of return as a political, economic and legal act and right, as well as a subjective experience and claim, we want to explore how refugees living under temporary protection regimes imagine the conditions for the possibility of return; how the restriction of asylum procedures and humanitarian protection or conditions of poverty and getting stuck in Europe impact decisions about going ‘home’; how people subjected to forced displacement and violence imagine and understand ‘the right of return’ in different stages of their protracted exile.

Across lectures, panel discussions, and a concluding Long Table conversation, the event will open up new ways of understanding the temporalities, politics, and possibilities of return.

Programme

DAY 1

Return as Untimely Possibility

17 October, 5.30 pm, DLT

o Wayward Returns: Temporary Refugees, (In) Visible Border Crossers, and Exceptional Citizens on the Turkish-Syrian Border. Özge Biner and Zerrin Özlem Biner, SOAS and College de France

o "We don't return, we arrive." Staying, returning and arriving in Palestine. Ruba Salih, Università di Bologna

o Post deportation? Shahram Khosravi, Stockholm University

o Discussant: Dina Matar (SOAS)

DAY 2

Return as a Site of Intervention

18 October, 1:00 pm, SOAS Bar

o Temporalities of Return: Between Deferred and Imposed Exile Dana Erekat, Save the Children Jordan.

o “From every river to every sea”. Return and the decolonization of laws and borders Enrica Rigo, Università Roma 3

o Title Tbc. Laura HammonD, SOAS

o Title TBC. Camilo Perez-Bustillo (Instituto Fronterizo Esperanza El Paso)

o Camilo Perez-Bustillo, Instituto Fronterizo Esperanza El Paso

o Beyond the ‘Borders of Berlin’? West African perspectives on German immigration enforcement Aino Korvensyrjä, Migration Mobilities Bristol.

Long Table: A Discussion

18 October, 5:00 pm, SOAS Bar

o A participatory format where speakers and audience gather to reflect on key themes, acknowledging the tensions of private exchange and public engagement while celebrating collective knowledge-making.

Event Theme

Return - A Conversation

Return has emerged as the central objective and key site of intervention in migration management policies. The fall of the Assad regime has prompted several calls, especially so by European states, for a swift return of Syrians benefiting from often precarious forms of international protection. Similar calls may well arise soon concerning Ukrainian displaced populations. The new Trump administration took office amidst threats and plans to deport millions of illegalised migrants, which were swiftly implemented. The EU accelerates its Assisted Voluntary Repatriation programmes while it considers setting up offshore ‘return hubs’. Elsewhere, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Dominican Republic, Mauritania, Chile, and across the world, millions of refugees, stateless and illegalised persons live under the constant threat of deportation, expulsion and/or non-negotiable “voluntary” repatriations. This proliferation of repressive policies changes the meaning of not only migration and refugeehood but of citizenship itself.

And yet, we should not forget that for many migrants, return is also a yearning for a homeplace. It is an aspiration for those who labour away from home under the pressure of economic duress. It is a series of intimate practices aimed at creating a safe space where dignity is restored, an incremental everyday effort toward the amelioration of individual and collective lives.

Return also constitutes a political claim. The war in Gaza reminds us in the most compelling way that return is both a twisted mirror image of a lost geography, and a right under international law. The notion of repatriation, which often implies reintegration into a system, a return to home as a familiar place, may not exist.

Return is an ongoing process and a series of practices within migration.

Focusing on the multiple temporalities and spaces constitutive of return as a political, economic and legal act and right, as well as a subjective experience and claim, we want to explore how refugees living under temporary protection regimes imagine the conditions for the possibility of return; how the restriction of asylum procedures and humanitarian protection or conditions of poverty and getting stuck in Europe impact decisions about going ‘home’; how people subjected to forced displacement and violence imagine and understand ‘the right of return’ in different stages of their protracted exile. Who is keen to return? Who is forced to return? Who refuses to return? How is it possible to stop involuntary returns? How do migrants and refugees mobilize their economic and political capital to secure the conditions significant for return? How do those who remained reconcile with the return of the displaced?

"We don't return, we arrive." Staying, returning and arriving in Palestine

In this talk, I start from the painful, yet urgent question of what horizons can be conceived at a time of genocidal violence, when the very materiality of Palestinian life-worlds and existence are eroded day by day? I start from David Scott's reflections the relationship between experience and expectation. Rather than reflecting, as we conventionally do, on the ways in which the past informs the present, Scott asks: How does the present that we inhabit affect the ways in which the past is told and what hopes and expectations for the future are forged? Against this background I reflect on returns and arrivals, as well as continuous presence, accounting for what these mean for Palestinians ethnically cleansed nearly 80 years ago, and for their offspring including the Palestinians in and of Gaza who returned 'home' to the rubble and destruction of their refugee camps, following the short lived ceasefire in February 2025. What meanings and visions are return and arrival imbued with? What political horizons do they sustain? I propose the intertwined concepts of home, indigeneity and return as prisms that together articulate potential futures where Palestinians are neither colonised nor natives and where indigeneity conjures ideas and visions of radical justice, beyond nativism and beyond liberal rights and colonial borders. I want to suggest that Palestinian indigeneity, which the politics of return stands for, is not a nostalgic claim to an ancestral home and land. Life in displacement has re-animated political cultures and visions that imbued return with active processes of self-making and home remaking which constitute a powerful tapestry of what liberation could look like.

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Ruba Salih is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna. Before joining Bologna in 2022, she was a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London.

Post-Deportation?

The notion of return is grounded in an idea that naturalizes the nation-state system, built upon an uncritical link between individuals and territory. Forced return or deportation is seen as a way to restore the 'broken' connection between nativity and nationality, between biological life and political belonging. Experiences of deportation often reveal a spatial and temporal stretching of abandonment. The socio-political conditions of post-deportation generate their own temporality. For many, particularly long-term residents, life after deportation is experienced as a form of exile. It underscores how deportees experience life as fragmented, interrupted, and scattered, much like exile itself: a rupture in the relationship between time and place. In this talk, I will present my research on post-deportation to Afghanistan.

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Shahram Khosravi is professor of Anthropology at Stockholms University. His research interests include anthropology of Iran, forced displacement, border studies, and temporality. Khosravi is the author of several books such as : Young and Defiant in Tehran (2008); The Illegal Traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders, (2010); Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, (2017); After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, Palgrave (2017, edited volume); Waiting. A project in Conversation (2021, edited volume), Seeing Like a Smuggler (2022, edited volume), and The Gaze of the X-ray: An Archive of Violence (2024, edited volume). He started Critical Border Studies, a network for scholars, artists and activists to interact.

Wayward Returns: Temporary Refugees, (In) Visible Border Crossers, and Exceptional Citizens on the Turkish-Syrian Border.

In this paper, we aim to explore and discuss the diverse experiences and imaginings of return, as well as the shifting political significance of return, before and after the fall of the Assad regime, spanning from March 2011 to December 2025. Based on long-term research during the Syrian revolution and oral history interviews with Syrians after the fall, we argue that for Syrians who dwell/ wait, and live in Turkey, a return is planned and imagined from the moment of departure.

Return is not a one-way process. Instead, it consists of cross-border movements through multiple temporalities of war, refugeehood and exile. Following the fall of the regime, return is experienced as a confrontational act to find the places of the lost, dead and disappeared and left behind. This confrontation with loss leads to anger, disappointment, and, at the same time, hope to mourn and envision the un(timely) possibilities of imagining and rebuilding a new life.

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Özge Biner is a researcher at the Collège de France. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Strasbourg University. Her research engages with the political, legal and social effects of the experience of exile and return in the border zones of Europe and the Middle East. Since 2015, she has been conducting ethnographic research on the Turkish-Syrian border focusing on the experience of forced displacement and forced return in the context of Syrian war. She is a co-investigator of the research project ‘Archives of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future-making Across Closed Borders’ an interdisciplinary and multi-modal project to create a digital archive on solidarity practices involving citizens and refugees in Turkey and the UK. Her research is available in platforms such as New Perspectives on Turkey (2018), Comparative Migration Studies (2019), Social Anthropology (2021), and International Journal of Migration and Border Studies (2024).

Zerrin Özlem Biner is a senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, and co-director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS. Her research expertise encompasses political violence, ethnographies of the state, memory, materiality, forced displacement, and everyday life in conflict and post-conflict processes. She is the author of States of Dispossession: Violence and Coexistence in Southeastern Turkey (UPenn, 2020) and co-editor of Reverberations: Time and Space across Violence (UPenn, 2021). Currently, Ozlem is the PI of an AHRC-funded project, 'Archive of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future Making across Closed Borders' that aims to create a digital archive on the life histories of young people and activists acting in the migration field of Turkey and the UK.

Temporalities of Return: Between Deferred and Imposed Exile

In Jordan, the idea of ‘return’ carries different weights. The recent fall of the Assad regime and the ongoing war on Gaza have made it even more evident that the ‘right of return’ is not the same for all refugees — it is politicized and deeply contested. For Palestinians, return is a recognized right under international law, enshrined in UNGA Resolution 194, yet endlessly deferred. It remains central to identity and politics across generations, while in practice it has become a terrain where states and international actors regulate mobility and belonging. For Syrians, return is less a right and more a policy horizon, pushed forward even as conditions remain unsafe. Both cases remind us that return is not simply about going home — it is about how states manage rights, identity, and futures. Seen together, Jordan becomes a living record of how return can be both a promise and a threat, shaping refugeehood and citizenship not as endpoints, but as ongoing struggles.

Dana Erekat is a Palestinian American architect, planner, and development practitioner with experience across international organizations, NGOs, and the public and private sectors in the Middle East and the US. From 2013–2016, she served as Head of Aid Management and Coordination/Advisor to the Minister at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning, where she led the technical committee for the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction Plan.

She is the author of several publications and photography series focused on planning practices. She has a BA in architecture from UC Berkeley and a Masters in City Planning from MIT.

“From every river to every sea”. Return and the decolonization of laws and borders

The presentation discusses the multiple asymmetrical lines that intersect in the discourse on return. Similar to crossing borders, returning is an asymmetrical act that not only depends on the side from which it is viewed. Different aspects of this asymmetry emerge when we take into consideration the time involved, as well as the power relations engaged in the process of returning.

The presentations aims to explore the centrality of return for the decolonisation of the laws of borders.

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Enrica Rigo earned a PhD in ‘Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Theory’ at University of Naples and she was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute of Florence. Her research themes include: citizenship, multiculturalism, European studies, human rights and theories of justice. She is currently Senior Researcher in Philosophy of Law at the University of Roma Tre – Law faculty. Her teaching and research duties include: Adjunct professor of the Legal Clinic Course on Migration and Citizenship; Adjunct professor of Human Rights; Coordinator of the project Laboratory of Theory and Practice of Rights – funded by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Charlemagne Foundation. She has acted in several campaigns for the improvement of the rights of migrants.

Beyond the ‘Borders of Berlin’? West African perspectives on German immigration enforcement

The EU frames deportation as ‘return’—a technical, logistical process aligned with international law and the global nation-state order. Drawing on ethnographic research and activism with West Africans resisting deportation in the German asylum system after 2015, this presentation examines deportation as a transnational field of struggle, racialised dispossession, and counterinsurgency. The colonial origins and contemporary extractivist and imperialist functions of nation-state borders are particularly evident in the relationship between West Africa and Western Europe. What insights do these marginalised struggles against dispossession at the ‘heart of Europe’ offer for forging social relations and organising beyond borders and deportation?

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Aino Korvensyrjä is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Helsinki. She is currently working on a book manuscript about deportation and migrant struggles in Germany. Aino collaborates with others to document and organise against deportation, borders, criminalisation, and policing.

"Mass deportation, resistance & the rights to migrate, remain and return amid fascism and racism, on a global scale"

The right to freedom of movement is under concerted attack everywhere- migrant movements and their allies need to rethink human rights in order to defend it.

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Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is a human rights scholar and advocate who was long based in Mexico City and at the U.S-Mexico border, was raised in New York City as the child of Colombian migrants, and is the parent of migrants of Mexican origin, currently based at Saint Mary's College of California as a professor of law and ethnic studies and previously a fellow based at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). His books include Human Rights, Hegemony and Utopia in Latin America: Poverty, Forced Migration and Resistance in Mexico and Colombia (Brill 2016/Haymarket 2017); co-founder of Witness at the Border (www.witnessattheborder.org) and the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement, based in Mexico City, the first tribunal of its kind focused on the violations of the rights of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons on a global scale (see: https://truthout.org/articles/tribunal-finds-mexico-and-us-jointly-responsible-for-human-rights-crisis-linked-to-drug-war/)

Host or Publisher SOAS CMDS