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Introduction and setting the scene, refugee return—the concept of home, return home—the intersection of concept and praxis, conclusions.

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Refugees and Their Return Home: Unsettling Matters *

* This paper is a revised version of a keynote lecture given at a conference on Return, Remixing and Reconciliation: Lessons to Be Learned, Nicosia, Cyprus, November 2016, organised by the PRIO Centre Cyprus, and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

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Roger Zetter, Refugees and Their Return Home: Unsettling Matters, Journal of Refugee Studies , Volume 34, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 7–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feab005

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‘Return in safety and dignity’ is promoted as the optimum durable solution to refugee displacement. This paper explores the concepts of home and territory as dominant variables in refugee return, with their implicit suggestion of people ‘belonging’ to a defined territory and ‘remixed’ in a restoration of the status quo ante.

The paper is in three parts, the first of which outlines the institutional context and evolving policy discourse of refugee return. Analysing the problematic of return as a conceptual challenge contingent on the contested meanings of home constitutes the second part. How the construct of home intersects the lives of refugees in exile, is juxtaposed with analysis of the deterritorialized identity of refugees in the context of return and remixing, concluding with discussion of the dialectic between home and deterritorialization. The third part of the paper examines the intersection of the concept of home and policy and praxis. Spontaneous return provides important indicators of territorialized identity, reinforced by evidence that housing is one of four key conditions that may facilitate voluntary assisted refugee return. Conversely, the significance of home is also shown to be subordinated by other characteristics of refugee return—notably secondary migration of returnees to urban areas, and the separating out of previously ethnically mixed communities. These outcomes question the instrumentality of home and territory for remixing and reintegration. Gender dimensions are also considered.

The conclusions emphasize how the conjuncture between a conceptual understanding of return and home, and the praxis constraints and opportunities, can help to address some of the key challenges of return. Equally, the deterritorialized perspective shows how the process of return hinges on aspatial characteristics such as the social, political, and economic expectations and challenges for returning refugees.

Under the auspices of the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), succeeded by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), millions of uprooted people and refugees in Europe were returned to their countries of origin at the end of the World War II. This process was the forerunner of the UNHCR’s longstanding mantra of ‘return in safety and dignity’, one of the three so-called durable solutions to refugee displacement promoted by the international community.

Repatriation has been pursued by the UNHCR, intergovernmental organizations and governments as the optimum durable solution ( Long 2013 ; Hammond 2014 ). Usually mobilized by tripartite agreements, repatriation accelerated through the 1980s in Central America with CIREFCA, then in Mozambique, Angola, and Rwanda, amongst other countries, in High Commissioner Ogata’s ‘decade of return’ in the 1990s when 10 million refugees returned to their countries of origin. Refugee return has been predicated on a general presumption that refugees fleeing from violent emergencies will mostly return voluntarily, be that spontaneously or in an organized manner, once the conditions precipitating their flight have ended.

Perhaps surprisingly given this agenda, the principle international legal instrument dealing with refugees, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, does not directly address the question of refugee return except, negatively, with the overriding principle of non-refoulement . Nevertheless, the Refugee Convention makes clear that refugee status is not permanent and ceases once a refugee re-avails her/himself of national protection in the country of origin. Article 1C of the Convention also defines the kinds of situations that constitute the Cessation of Refugee Status and thus the scope for repatriation. Moreover, under the 1950 Statute of the Office of the UNHCR, ( UN 1950 ), the Office is mandated with a central role in ‘seeking permanent [i.e. the three durable ] solutions’ (emphasis added) to the problem of refugees of which voluntary repatriation is the one of concern here. The Statute reinforces this role by calling on governments to cooperate with the High Commissioner inter alia by ‘assisting the High Commissioner in (her/his) efforts to promote the voluntary repatriation of refugees’ ( UNHCR 1980 ).

However, it was not until thirty years later, in 1980, that the UNHCR’s special competence for refugee return was elaborated and codified in any detail. This was the outcome of ExCom 1980. Five years later, ExCom 1985 significantly developed the doctrine of voluntary repatriation, reiterating and further detailing the basic principles ( UNHCR 1985 ). And in 2003, the UNHCR’s Framework for Durable Solutions for Refugees and Persons of Concern further articulated the international commitment to, and the modalities of return, through the good offices of the UNHCR ( UNHCR 2003 ). Looking beyond the scope of the Refugee Convention, the right of refugees to return to their country of origin is fully recognized in international law and enshrined in various binding international human rights instruments.

But there has also been a strong counter narrative to refugee return: partition and the un-mixing of populations is the striking legacy of some major conflicts in the 20th century—Greece–Turkey (1922), Germany–Poland (1945) (amongst many other expulsions of ethnic Germans at the end of WW II), India–Pakistan (1947), Israel–Palestine (1948), and, de facto, Cyprus (1974). The historical context of exile but no return was further embedded by the welcome given to those fleeing communist states in the 1950s and 1960s. An ironic reprise of these latter circumstances is the more recent separation of populations in the new states carved out of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia and some former republics of the USSR.

These conditions notwithstanding, from the 1960s onwards and under the auspices of the UNHCR as we have seen, return became the dominant international discourse to tackle mass exodus in the global south, the failure of burden sharing strategies and local integration in host countries, the limited success of resettlement and now, as an instrument that demarcates an era of containment and non-entrée regimes in the global north. The emphasis on return satisfies this nexus of contemporary political and instrumental objectives. But beyond these self-interested objectives, return—often promoted as ‘just’ return—is legitimized in terms of the Westphalian state order: the restoration of the state–citizen bond of people ‘belonging’ to and enjoying rights in a defined territory ( Shacknove 1985 ). It inclines to the restitution of the status quo ante of national identity (or identities since many countries have multiple ethnic and religious groupings), and rights protection which, as Arendt showed, may be a comforting but illusory objective. People ‘out of place’ are perceived as a threat to territorial integrity: return and remixing are seemingly the natural order for displaced populations and their countries of origin.

And yet, return is the not-so-easy option in the contemporary period ( Markowitz and Stefansson 2009 ). For example, whilst millions of Afghan refugees have returned from Iran and Pakistan in the last two decades—under the joint UNHCR/IOM Solution Strategy for Afghan Refugees (SSAR)—millions of these returnees have subsequently fled again into exile: there are over 2.3 million registered Afghan refugees and an estimated further two to three million undocumented Afghan refugees ( Zetter 2019 ). More recently, a small trickle of Syrian refugees has been returning—in excess of 383,000 between 2017 and 2019 ( UNHCR 2020 : 50); yet in 2018, for example, over 632,000 Syrian refugees were newly displaced and over 6.6 million Syrian refugees remain in exile with virtually no prospect of return in ‘safety and dignity’ (UNHCR 2020).

Worldwide, in 2019 some 317,200 refugees returned to their countries of origin compared with 593,800 in 2018 and 667,400 in 2017. Despite the positive fact that the absolute number of returnees is significantly higher than in some earlier years in this decade (e.g. 201,400 and 126,800 in 2015 and 2014, respectively), the actual proportion of returnees is declining against the sharply rising total of refugees: in 2019 return represented just 1.2 per cent of the global total of 26 million refugees ( UNHCR 2020 ).

The corollary of such low rates of refugee return is that an estimated 15.7 million refugees (77 per cent of those under UNHCR’s mandate) are in protracted displacement ( UNHCR 2020 : 23), of which some 5.8 million have been in exile for more than 20 years ( UNHCR 2020 ). The World Bank estimates that the average duration of exile for current refugees is 10.3 years ( World Bank 2016 : 11), whilst the average duration of the 32 protracted refugee situations at the end of 2015 is estimated at about 26 years. Somali, Afghan, Burundi, and Sahrawi refugees and, above all, Palestinians, are exemplar populations in protracted exile.

Alongside the officially organized process of so-called voluntary assisted repatriation (VAR), defined in these data, very significant, but undocumented, numbers of refugees return spontaneously and independently often in unpropitious conditions ( Harild et al. 2015 ). That this phenomenon is spontaneous and independent, probably tells us rather more about how refugees perceive ‘home’ and return, compared to life in exile, than contrived VAR processes. Whether voluntary or spontaneous, refugee return is episodic, intermittent and often not permanent, as the case of Afghanistan shows.

However, despite the assumptions about and processes for refugee return, clearly they lack traction, because return is contested territory, both figuratively and in practice. The political and geo-political feasibility of return is highly constrained in these and many other contemporary situations of refugee displacement, whilst adverse social and economic conditions in countries of origin further preclude the possibility of return.

Within the context of international ambitions to promote refugee return, the paper now turns to explore a central concept that underpins the discourse of return—the concept of home.

The vocabulary of return is replete with ‘Res’— re turn, re patriation, re integration, re habilitation, re construction, and re mixing: these terms appeal to the search for a ‘natural’ conclusion of displacement—a circularity of movement which, in its symmetry suggests a finite end point of return and settling back home. I argue however that, from the perspective of refugees, this is fundamentally not the case: return is not necessarily finite, but an unsettling issue and challenge underscored in the title of the paper. Reviewing this problematic, I explore the intersecting concepts of return, home, and deterritorialized identity. In this way I will show why paradoxically, since one might assume that returning ‘home’ is the natural preference of refugees, it is an unsettling question.

For refugees, return is a complex process conditioned by: micro-level complexities of decision-making regarding repatriation versus the extent of local settlement in the host-country (or the highly unlikely prospect of third-country resettlement); the wider concerns that they may have for security and rights protection or other needs material upon their return; or the particular—and often changing—historical and cultural contexts in which their exile and possible return are embedded. Many refugees do not return; or they ‘self-return’ spontaneously, but often doing so individually or in groups all at different times of their choosing, or more, confusingly, moving back and forth from country of refuge to country of origin as security and livelihood conditions dictate. (Re)integration, and notably the social and political dimensions of the returnee–stayee relationship constitute further uncertainties. All these dimensions raise fundamental questions about our understanding of the concept of return and, especially, return ‘home’ as the underlying imperative ( Markowitz and Stefansson 2009 ). Moreover, these issues constitute a profound challenge to internationally supported repatriation programmes and to host countries whose main aim is to end refugee situations on their territories.

The Concept of Home in the Context of Return

A, the, core element in the research literature and policy agenda is the notion of returning home. Thus, the central conceptual challenge lies in how we construct the meaning of home and homeland, the nature of space and place and how the two intersect in the lives of displaced refugees.

Policy makers have promoted return as the preferred durable solution based on the principle assumption that a natural association exists between people and place—a sedentarist perspective. As the UNHCR put it more than 30 years ago in a widely quoted statement, ‘Man is not an ethereal spirit living outside space or time but a terrestrial creature with roots in a land and its history that has formed common beliefs and values…and conferred on it an identity. The link between people and a land is a profound one.’ ( UNHCR 1985a , quoted in Warner 1994 : 163).

Despite extensive cultural and physical variations, there are few concepts so widespread and readily engaged across the world as ‘home’ as the material representation of space and place. And for this reason, amongst others, the concept of home resonates strongly with the notion of refugee return.

Essentializing the belief that people are intricately ‘rooted’ to a particular place and ‘home’, and that identity, culture, history, and belonging are territorialized has an immediate appeal in the context of refugee displacement and return. By uprooting people from their natural place in the world, displacement—whether refugees or migrants—fractures the deep bond between people and home. In my own work on Cyprus, I have shown how protracted exile and the loss of distinctively bounded space, the home and farmland—have been instrumentalized by claims for restitution and compensation: in effect the attempt to repossess the ownership of space ( Zetter 2011 ; see also Bryant 2010 ). The violence of exile, the injustice of exclusion and the contested right of return all help to reify a picture of home for refugees and a dream they are frequently unable to realise. Furthermore, as Kibreab (1999) argues, place-identity is ultimately politically territorialized and reinforced in the nation state and one’s national identity. Returning refugees to their homes restores their rooted existential meaning and with it their identity and nationality.

In exile, as Gupta and Ferguson ( 1997 : 39) point out, the act of remembering ‘home’ among displaced communities ‘remains one of the most powerful unifying symbols for …displaced people’. Certainly, home and groundedness, as a physical representation of identity and subsequent loss, feature strongly in the memory, or at least the mythology of memories, of refugees ( Hirschon 1989 ; Zetter 1999 , 2012 ; Bryant 2010 ; Oktay 2015 ; Taylor 2015 ). These memories of home often constitute a powerful impetus for return.

As many other scholars have shown, for example Bryant (2010) and Taylor (2015) on Cyprus, Hirschon (1989) on Greek refugees from Asia Minor and Lambo ( 2012 : 12–15) on Somali refugees in Kenya, refugees actively engage in a complex process of ‘place making’ by constructing a representation of home in their minds, linking an often nostalgic and mythologized past ( Zetter 1999 ), with the present to inform the context of possible return. Laying claim to a construct of home while in exile, the meaning of ‘territory’, both its physical and its symbolic representation, may not diminish but is memorialized, perpetuated, and renewed often inter-generationally: young refugees, even those born in exile, receive and recreate a mental image of home without the advantage of memory to support this construct. Through memory or transmitted memory, home and the ‘right of return’ may become just as important in rhetorical terms as in material terms and yet be rejected in practice even when it is a realistic option.

Malkki (1997) , although contesting sedentary theorists, summarizes their argument thus: displacement ruptures the relationship between a person and place; the transience and uprootedness of placelessness, ‘jeopardis[es] the very understanding of who one is and where one belongs’ ( Lambo 2012 : 7). In short, home is a project , a process , and a destination .

The Challenge to the Concept of Home: Deterritorialized Identity in the Context of Return

In opposition, post-modern scholars amongst others, often talk about diasporic or ‘deterritorialized’ communities, placing a very different emphasis on the concept of return. They eschew notions of home and spatial belonging with its sedentarist underpinning. Scholars such as Malkki (1995 , 1997 ), Stepputat (1994 , 1999 ), Brun (2001) , and Warner (1994) offer critiques that challenge the reductivist view of the relationship between people–home–place as the ‘natural order of things’ and consequently challenge the ideology of sedentarism. Here the argument proposes an aspatial construction of refugee identity that is, instead socially, politically and historically situated. As Warner uncompromisingly puts it, ‘It is the relations with other people that ground man [sic] in his existence, and not the physical grounding of the individual and group with a given space,’ ( Warner 1994 : 165). Exploring the mindset of policy makers concerned with refugee return, he is even more trenchant: ‘The refugee’s return to home, and our desire to prioritize that return, are all our desires to return to a world of alignments and symmetries… a world that never was ’ (emphasis added) ( Warner 1994 : 168).

Like Warner, Malkki and Stepputat also reject the spatial/home nexus in the discourse on refugee return. Their analyses complement Warner’s emphasis on the conditionality of the social world for refugee return, by adding historical and political contingency. They offer perhaps the strongest challenge to the thesis which grounds refugee identity in place and space and the implications this has for refugee return.

In his work on Guatemalan refugees returning from a decade of exile in Mexico, Stepputat (1994) provides a transnational perspective on exile and return which rejects the attachment of people to certain places and territories as a natural given. Rather, he argues that the dynamics of flight and return should be explored from the perspective of what he terms the ‘politics of space’ of the nation state ( Stepputat 1999 ). In other words, we cannot consider the dynamics and scope of return without understanding how the techniques of power for the control of territories and populations produced the refugee exodus in the first place.

Similarly, Malkki’s (1995) research on the Hutu refugees from Burundi in Tanzania argues that policy makers, by depoliticizing the refugee label, obscure the historical and political contingency of refugee identity and the exilic processes that create this identity. Malkki reveals how influences such as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of ‘enemies’ get constructed in exile. With this understanding in mind, it is impossible to conceive of return, especially organized voluntary repatriation, apolitically and ahistorically.

The Dialectic Between Home and Deterritorialization

A central concern in this discourse is, therefore, the dialectic between the material representation of a particular geographical space and physical place from which refugees are displaced on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a complex environment in which space, time (history), political context, social networks and sensory experiences, psychological resonances and social meaning come together as a construct of what has been lost in displacement and what, potentially, might be recovered by return.

Significant here is the transformative impact of exile which both reinforces loss but also conditions the prospect of, and the aspiration for, return. There are irreparable losses when refugees flee, especially where exile is protracted, which are memorialized and retained in the memory. Yet we should recognize how, for example, cultural involution often turns to re-invention, as Colson’s (1971) classic work has shown which is far more than just the preservation of the past by those who are unwilling to adjust to new realities. These processes demonstrate the remarkable adaptability of cultural and ethnic markers and the agency of refugees in exile. Food, music, literature and art, for example, become a source of pride through their inherited meaning and value; and they sustain a rich diversity of traditions and transmitted memory, which is not the same as rootedness in home and place.

Something of this transformative process is exemplified in research on Greek–Cypriot refugees in Cyprus ( Zetter 2011 ). In this situation, notions of home and land, as a distinctively bounded material and cognitive space, which characterized how the Greek–Cypriot refugees at first expressed their sense of loss in exile, were gradually subordinated to notions of a symbolic loss: Greek–Cypriot claims for compensation in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and the UK Court of Appeal appeared to be as much a matter of establishing rights and justice for return as they were the subject of restitution for material loss of land and housing ( Zetter 2011 ).

Summarizing the dialectic, it is not the case that territory, place and thus home have no role to play in how return is conceived. We should not refute in seemingly absolute terms, as Warner and Malkki appear to have done, the relevance of home and space as constructs in the context of return. At the same time, their work helps to caution against an exclusively essentialist understanding of people’s relationship to place—it is much wider and more complex as we shall see in subsequent discussion on the interface between policy and concept. Both extremes are over simplistic and fail to show how home, place, and space are social, albeit ambiguous constructions. Research by Bryant (2010) and Taylor (2015) on Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees illustrates this ambiguity but also how these social constructs can be remembered and experienced from afar to sustain the desire for return. Stepputat (1999 : 418), rowing back somewhat from his earlier post-modernist rejection of territorial identity, argues against the oversimplified bipolar opposition of territorialized and deterritorialized identities. He states, ‘Identity is not necessarily deterritorialized but rather re-territorialized….the displacement and migration of people is often accompanied by the development of a strong notion of attachment to certain place or territories’. And as Lambo (2012 : 16) puts it, what we see is space that is not a fixed and unchanging entity, but something that ‘continues to be constructed, reimagined, and preserved both collectively as a community in exile as well as individually’.

In other words, transcending the uniqueness and partiality of a previous, and now lost, physical and spatial locus, we should instead appreciate how the past is reshaped and reimagined by the longue durée of exile which gives meaning to the possibility of return in multiple and complex ways.

Refugee return and the concept of home are not merely abstract concepts that have meaning only in the imaginary of refugees. They are decisively mediated by the interests of international actors, donors, the governments of host countries and the countries of origin, all of whom, as discussed in the first section of the paper, are strongly motivated to promote internationally organized programmes of repatriation. Accordingly, this section of the paper now explores the intersection between the concept of ‘home’ and policy and praxis, whilst recognizing that this relationship sits alongside and in conjunction with multiple societal, security, rights, livelihood, and logistical factors that both underpin the decision to return and the organization of VAR programmes (for more detail see e.g. Harild et al. 2015 ; Forced Migration Review 2019 ). From this perspective, the concept of home/space/place becomes not just a rhetorical device on which refugees might construct, amongst other objectives, the prospect of return; it also serves to underline a specific portfolio of policy and operational challenges to implementing return.

From an operational point of view, refugee return programmes tend to have been mobilized as essentially technocratic exercises dominated by legal, logistical, and organizational priorities, factors which underscore the well-documented complexity and variety of VAR (see e.g. Black and Koser 1999 ; Hammond 1999 , 2014 ; Harild et al. 2015 ). Whilst not denying these operational challenges, their intersection with the concept of home is problematic. The conceptual and operational worlds of refugee return are often in conflict, and often in paradoxical and unexpected ways, not least because VAR programmes are mobilized as essentially technocratic but ahistorical and apolitical processes. This approach understates or misjudges not only many of the underlying reasons that generated the refugees (and thus how return is perceived); but also, more specifically for this paper, this approach does not adequately discern how these factors condition the meaning of home and place to refugees when return is actualized. This problematic, the contested meaning of actual return home, is explored from several perspectives.

Spontaneous Return as Territorialized Return

‘Spontaneous’ or unassisted return home, involving substantial numbers of people, has taken place to countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, Liberia, South Sudan, and Iraq (see e.g. Hovil 2010 ; Chatty and Mansour 2011 ). Often in advance of formal peace agreements, to areas or countries that are far from peaceful ( Stein and Cuny 1994 ), stable, or in post-conflict recovery, and certainly in advance of VAR schemes, the process of spontaneous return seems to lend weight to the importance of the territorialized meaning of home as a motivating force, all things being equal.

Initially, returning home may be exploratory, and episodic and iterative, rather than permanent; but it is by no means random or unorganized, as the term ‘spontaneous’ misleadingly suggests. Refugees are prospecting the conditions for rebuilding homes, social fabric and livelihoods, and for establishing entitlements and forging the basis for a permanent return. Usually this is enacted by sending just one or a few members of the household or community back home, whilst the other members remain in exile until the conditions for larger or more permanent return home seem satisfactory. The case of Iraqi refugees in Syria, before the civil war in Syria, is one example ( Chatty and Mansour 2011 ); Afghan, Somali, and South Sudanese refugees ( Hovil 2010 ) have also used this strategy of geographical dispersal of family members between exile and return locations to maximize access to livelihoods, services, or other priorities for family wellbeing.

Albeit contingent on, and aligned with, many other variables that condition the overall decision to return spontaneously, this spontaneous process is focused not just on return but return to a specific location, and often in unpropitious circumstances, thus seeming to highlight territoriality—‘home’—as a dominant factor.

If we conclude that territoriality is a significant determinant of spontaneous, but initially transitory, refugee return, then this has important implications for VAR schemes.

First, this evidence indicates that VAR schemes should sustain but also transcend their finite, ‘end-of-movement’ objectives and strategies: instead what is needed are interventions that sustain coping and self-reliance from the initial exploration of home through to the more enduring, organized return home.

Second, from this perspective, return (and indeed exile) is better understood as a process of adaptation or optimization strategies by refugees to achieve their own versions of ‘durable’, i.e. sustainable, but not necessarily permanent, ‘solutions’ to the different circumstances in which they find themselves ( Hammond 1999 , 2004 ).

Third, spontaneous return home challenges the assumption on which return—indeed all three durable solutions—is predicated: this is that external actors and agencies provide ‘solutions’. Refugees are not people ‘to be returned’. Return cannot be driven or provided by external stakeholders based on simplistic assumptions of what home might be for the refugees, only supported by them. Rather, return is a long-term process which is led by, and depends on the agency of displaced and affected populations themselves; their perspective on home and their aspirations of how home can be rebuilt (physically in some instances and metaphorically), are central to the meaning and realization of return. As Omata (2013 : 1281) puts it, we need to understand the untidy and negotiated nature of refugees’ return decision-making.

Home and Territory as Instruments in VAR Programmes

Operational experience from VAR programmes further confirms the significant role which home plays in refugee return ( Harild et al. 2015 ). The evidence suggests that housing, including access to and the recovery and restitution of land and property, is amongst the four key conditions that may encourage and facilitate, but do not necessarily ‘guarantee’ that refugees return. Whilst the research evidence does not give supremacy to return home over the other three variables (livelihood opportunities and resources, security, access to adequate services), the ability to reclaim their land, especially for refugees from rural areas, is central to their prospects of re-establishing livelihoods. This appears to have been an important incentive, for example, for both the substantial ‘spontaneous’ and assisted returns by Afghan refugees in the early nineties ( Marsden 1999 ), for Angolan refugees reclaiming their land on their return from Zambia in 2002 onwards, and for refugees returning after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2015 to what became South Sudan ( Harild et al. 2015 ). Nevertheless, the operationally driven focus of international repatriation programmes tends to disregard the thorny issue of land rights and property restitution. Beyond the restitution of housing and land as material assets, restoration may also help to underpin the principle of a ‘just return’.

Gender and Return

Women face particular challenges on return, as they have done in displacement, since they may have fewer opportunities, fewer resources, usually lower social status, and less power and influence than men. Returning home often entails new hardships for women and girls, many of whom are not given a real choice about the decision to return, nor indeed to leave in the first place. Once home, female-headed families may face particular difficulties in securing livelihoods and accessing housing, land or property, education, and other essential services. The case of Chilean female refugees returning home at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship is an especially poignant example of the changing domestic power structures. Women were often more adaptable in exile and this was reflected in the changing balance of household roles and power between men and women. Reverting to more traditional, male-dominated structures on return, placed additional social and psychological pressure on women ( Lopez Zarzosa 1998 ).

Gender concerns highlight the importance of distinguishing the needs of different demographics and social groups within the returning populations. Returnees are not homogenous. Different communities and households have different needs, varying levels of social and economic vulnerability and coping capacities, often conditioned by to where they are returning.

Refugee Return: The Evidence of Deterritorialization

Recalling the first part of the paper, do these conclusions on spontaneous return and VAR suggest the imperative to return ‘home’ and, conversely, that deterritorialized identity and the dialectic between home and a deterritorialized identity are misplaced? These questions are now explored with evidence that seems to contradict the assumption that returning home is the dominant aspiration of refugees.

Whilst the narrative from praxis confirms, so far, the dominance of home in refugee return processes, counter evidence suggests that this may be subordinated to other determinates of where refugees return to. Two significant contemporary trends in refugee return question the importance of home, in a material and sedentary sense, as an instrument of return.

Returning refugees increasingly seek out urban destinations in their countries of origin; this mirrors the urbanization of refugees in exile, a significant characteristic of contemporary forced displacement situations. Examples of cities whose growth is significantly driven by the influx of returnees, and/or IDPs, are Kabul in Afghanistan—where some 70 per cent of the population may be returnees and/or Internally Displaced Person (IDPs)—Juba in South Sudan, Monrovia in Liberia, Luanda in Angola, Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, small towns and cities in Bosnia–Herzegovina (see e.g. Pantuliano et al. 2012 ; Harild et al. 2015 ).

While increasing numbers of refugees have fled from cities and towns, and might be expected to return there, significant numbers of refugees in the past and still today come from the rural areas. However, many of the latter group do not—as expected in the planning for VAR and reintegration—go back to their rural homes and communities they hailed from. If and when they do return, it is largely to urban locations in their country of origin. Return accelerates the process of urbanization.

What attracts increasing numbers of displaced/returnees to cities and towns is the expectation of better security and rights protection, along with better access to services and economic and employment opportunities than in rural areas, notwithstanding that all these elements are generally very scarce. In other words, refugees are trading off the socio-economic opportunities and prospects in urban areas against the territorial ‘imperative’ of returning to their home. Manifesting the dialectic between home and deterritorialization, this powerful trend of urbanized return endorses the view of those scholars who reject notions of the primacy of home and spatial belonging, with its sedentarist underpinning, as the determinant of where refugees return to. Rather, the evidence suggests it is the nexus of social, economic and political factors, what Warner termed ‘the relations with other people…not the physical grounding of the individual and group with a given space,’ ( Warner 1994 : 165), which are the determinants: not so much the physical space but the politics of space as Stepputat (1999) described it.

A second, and increasingly prevalent and disturbing, locational pattern of return is (forced) secondary displacement: the ‘re-displacement of returnees’. Large numbers of refugees returning to Iraq, Bosnia–Herzegovina, and South Sudan, for example, have initially gone back to their homes and towns, confirming the sedentarist view of return, and attempted to reintegrate where they previously lived in ethnically mixed communities. Subsequently, in Iraq, for example, fresh conflict and inter-ethnic violence have severely diminished security conditions which, along with widespread property confiscation, have subjected returnees (and co-ethnic stayees) to secondary displacement (see e.g. IDMC 2019 ; IOM 2019 ). The failure of the 1995 Dayton Agreement to reverse ethnic cleansing and recreate a multi-ethnic Bosnia–Herzegovina is another example. Extensive donor funded housing projects did not persuade returnees to go home. Instead, they either sold up or rented out houses preferring to separate out and regroup in mono-ethnic towns and cities ( Brubaker 2013 ). Over 1.6 million IDPs in South Sudan exemplify this pattern of secondary displacement of returnees following the post-independence power struggle and conflict. Mono-ethnic enclaves and regions now dominate ostensibly (re-)united countries, demonstrating the failure of peace building stability, rule of law, reconciliation, compensation and restitution processes, which might have enabled durable return home.

Both trends suggest that when the imaginary of home in exile is confronted by the reality of return, attachment to place and home are not imperative determinants. The experience of migration dynamics—forced displacement and return—has in some senses broken the sedenterist bond and the wish to take back the past of home and territory. In the case of return and urbanization, the dialectic between home and deterritorialization favours the latter. In the case of re-displacement on return, the evidence is ambivalent given the obvious existential threats in going home. Here though, using Stepputat’s concept of the politics of space, one might argue that countries rebuilding themselves after war tacitly accept or, indeed, deliberately activate deterritorialization strategies that deter and prevent refugees from physically going home. This outcome reprises, in some respects, the partition of states and the un-mixing of populations in the first half of the 20th century.

Return, Home, Integration

Turning finally to what is, for ‘sedentarists’, the ultimate aim of return home—social reintegration or ‘remixing’—some indication of the challenges in reaching this goal have already been highlighted.

Whilst local integration is often advocated ( Fielden 2008 ), and despite the role played by home and territoriality, the evidence suggests that, rather than material representation, it is socio-economic factors and social networks, in other words essentially non-spatial elements, that play a more significant role in the capacity for returnees to re-establish and reintegrate. To the extent that this is achieved, it is largely without national or international assistance. In addition, there are the psychological and material impacts of changes in self-identity that come from changes in social and demographic status in exile and on return. These factors, too, condition re-orientation to a changed ‘home’ and ‘homeland’—confronting the destruction or disappearance of a former lifeworld and home. Capturing the ambiguities of return, Lopez Zarzosa (1998) has suggested the concept of a ‘returnee’ identity, also reflected in King’s (2000) designation of return migration as a journey of either hope or despair.

For the most part, the record of refugee return home and remixing has been of only limited success; and reintegration in countries of origin beset with problems. Of the many factors that explain these limited outcomes, this paper has focused on the role played by the concept of home. By recognizing the conjuncture between a conceptual understanding of return and home on the one hand, and the praxis constraints and opportunities on the other, some of the key challenges of return can be addressed in ways that might provide opportunities for potentially more successful outcomes.

Even if the concept of home and its territorial embodiment provide an incomplete and, in many ways, unsatisfactory account of why and to what refugees aspire to return, nonetheless the concept’s value and importance lies in highlighting the part played by attachment to land and property as a motivation for return. Equally, it highlights the enormous practical challenges of return home, property restitution, and rebuilding the wider social fabric of the home territory. At the same time, the concept also highlights why eventual return home is so often an unsettling question for refugees at a material, cognitive, and social level: especially after protracted exile, reality does not match the imagined home in exile. This should help policy makers organizing voluntary return programmes to better understand and mediate the often dissonant and dysfunctional reaction to home by returning refugees.

The deterritorialized view of the post modernists also has utility for policy makers and institutions concerned with mobilizing return, although the lessons are even less readily appreciated. Here analysis shows how much the motive for and the process of return hinge on meeting social, political and economic expectations and challenges for the returning refugees; how stayees and refugees reconnect; and whether and how refugees can remix and reintegrate. To be sure, reconciliation and remixing, rather than population exchange, constitute the less easy option at least for outside parties, especially where there have been protracted and troubled histories of ethnic rivalry. However, the perceived injustices and violence that flow from an earlier era that produced refugees may leave unresolved legacies that return home resurrects: sometimes this may be immediate, as in the case of Iraq and Bosnia–Herzegovina for example, and sometimes this may be years or generations later. Apolitical and ahistorical ignorance are perhaps the most vital lessons that a deterritorialized view of home highlights.

However, whilst place and home as a fixed and final destination still dominate the international discourse on return, we must also recognize that displaced populations should no longer be considered as sedentary and ‘out of place’ and thus ‘to be returned’ home. Rather, return should be recognized as a self-directed, ‘purposive’ and informed action. Whether it is durable or not depends on how humanitarian and development actors support and facilitate these strategies.

Seeing the human condition of belonging and identity as bound up with specific material locations, and thus return from exile as essentially one of restoring place and home, offers one perspective on the problematic. But perceiving belonging and identity as bound up with deterritorialized political and aspatial social contexts, holds a very different meaning for the process and objectives of return.

A fitting coda is Loizos’ (1999 : 238) perceptive and poignant metaphor of the emotional, social and cognitive disruption and ambiguity of being a refugee—what he termed ‘refugee half-lives’—evoking what he described as a ‘power that goes on being active for many years but slowly loses its force’. For this reason alone refugee return home is an ‘unsettling matter’.

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• Performing Peace: Vernacular Reconciliation and the Diplomacy of Return in Cyprus
• Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia

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The Effect of the Refugee Crisis on Anti-Immigrant Attitudes

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• March 2, 2021
• Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
• The refugee crisis of 2015 has caused a large increase in immigrant percentages in populations worldwide. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of the refugee crisis on anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe. In particular, to what extent do changes in the numbers of immigrants affect anti-immigrant attitudes? I seek to answer this question by comparing survey responses from the European Values Survey at a time before the refugee crisis—2008—with a time point after the crisis-- 2017. The main focus of this study is on personal anti-immigrant attitudes, by which I mean the effect of immigrants on an individual’s personal life. The findings of this study show, contrary to expectation, that the larger the increase of immigrants in their country, the less likely individuals will perceive immigrants as a threat to their personal life. This study also shows that the larger the increase of immigrants in their country, Western European individuals are less likely to perceive immigrants as a threat to their personal life and Eastern European individuals are more likely to perceive immigrants as a threat to their personal life. The number of immigrants in a country does not seem to have an effect on economic immigrant attitudes and cultural immigrant attitudes.
• outgroup size
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• https://doi.org/10.17615/2gdh-xs52
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• Stephens, John
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Master’s Thesis The impact of refugees on host countries: A case study of Bangladesh under the Rohingya influx

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• Published 2018
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Land use and land cover change and its effect on land surface temperature: an impact analysis of rohingya influx in ukhia upazila between year 2000 to 2020, 21 references, rohingya refugees to bangladesh: historical exclusions and contemporary marginalization.

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A Study of Asylum Seeker/Refugee Advocacy: Paradoxes of Helping in a Climate of Hostility.

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Rethinking Migration

Rethinking Migration: Redesigning refugee camps - the case of Moria

van der Maas, Marcel (TU Delft Architecture and the Built Environment; TU Delft Architectural Engineering)

Smit, M.J. (mentor) Bilow, M. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

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In September 2020, camp Moria was completely destroyed by a fire. Due to European migration policy, the living conditions were abysmal, causing harm to refugees as well as the host community. The aim of the project is to create a non-site specific architectural model, framework and strategy for a design of a refugee camp on how quality can be created with very little means, addressing the existing problems within the current refugee camp design (approach). It is an exploration on the possibilities within the realm of architecture to alleviate to alleviate the suffering of the refugees as well as the disconnect between the refugees and the host community. With this, it can become a part in the larger discourse of refugees/camps, and hopefully giving policy makers and all involved a different look on the whole matter. First is the need to see refugee camps as something permanent, instead of a temporary solution to a ‘problem’ that will end. The initial framework/design of the camp needs to account for future expansion and development. The focus is on a bottom-up design approach which involves the refugees as well as the host community in the planning and construction process. Co-creation, the ability for the refugee to make changes to their homes according to their own needs, control over their own lives, interdependence (social and economic) between the host community and refugee camp, and fostering (economic) activity of these two parties involved are of essence. To kickstart this, straw is being used as a low-tech self-buildable construction material to create quality dwellings, improving on the living conditions in European refugee camps. Being a low-tech material, refugees can be involved in the building process. What’s more, Straw is a by-product of cereal crops. Cereal crops in turn can be used to produce food. This two-fold application of food/building construction can help refugees to be (economically) active by cultivating cereal by processing these crops into food, and the straw into buildings. On the flip-side, the building process and cultivation of cereal could benefit the local economy as well. Third, using this cultivation and processing of this crop to food or construction of buildings, can also be points of exchange, collaboration and interaction between host community and refugee. Shown is a base model, idea and strategy, which can be used anywhere in the world. In this specific project, it is adapted to the terrain and climate of Lesvos. By actively engaging refugees in the building of the city and giving (economic) opportunities, we challenge the view (rethinking part) from seeing them as a liability or threat and something ‘temporary’ to people who should be treated with respect and in a humane way. All the while fostering integration and cohesion with surroundings.

Refugee camp Moria Straw Straw bale construction Co-creation Interdependence Economic activity Integration low-tech

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159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/refugee-essay-topics/

"159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 2 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/refugee-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/refugee-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/refugee-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "159 Refugee Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/refugee-essay-topics/.

2024 ASCA Awards

28 June 2024

2024 ASCA Article Award: Nadica Denić

Epistemic Decolonization of Migration: Digital Witnessing of Crisis and Borders in For Sama . In Blaagaard BB, Marchetti S, Ponzanesi S, Bassi S, editors, Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe . Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari. 2023. p. 95-112.

It is evident that migration is one of the key issues of our age. A far more complex, underlying issue pertains to the question how knowledge about migration is produced. What, exactly, do we know about migration? Which media, actors and institution set the parameters of the conversation about migration and to what extent are migrant voices included in this conversation? This year, the ASCA Best Article Award is awarded to a study that investigates how forms of digital witnessing can intervene in migration discourses and policies. The author of this article does so by focusing on For Sama , a 2019 documentary directed by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts. This documentary captures key events in the life of al-Kateab and her family as they grapple with the impact of the Syrian Civil War and the lived experience of migration as a profound crisis of everyday life. The author argues, and convincingly demonstrates, how al-Kateab, by this act of witness, gives voice to the migrant reality and succeeds in addressing audiences on her own terms. By doing so, the documentary contributes to the process of epistemic decolonization of migration. Considering the timely and urgent topic of this article, and its profound and deeply emphatic analysis, we unanimously agreed that the ASCA Best Article Award should be awarded to the article ‘Epistemic Decolonization of Migration: Digital Witnessing of Crisis and Borders in For Sama ’ by Nadica Denić.

2024 ASCA Book Award : Slava Greenberg

Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship . Indiana University Press, 2023.

Slava Greenberg. Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Indiana University Press, 2023.

Can one see with ears and hear with eyes? A seemingly simple question that follows from Slava Greenberg’s book confronts and reconfigures one's implicit sensory hierarchies of being-in- and experiencing the world. A reading that makes one question their understanding of the everyday is a good one; a reading that induces (self-)reflection on the reader’s own positionality is a remarkable piece of intellectual work.

Slava Greenberg explores the complexities of disabled bodyminds representations in what may be the most transgressive cinematic convention – animation. As a powerful tool of imagination that goes beyond the possibilities of physical bodies, not only human ones, Greenberg's cases are a fun ride, ranging from ancillary (and fascinating) insights about mainstream productions like Pixar’s Nemo and Netflix’s hit BoJack Horseman to in-depth case studies of avant-garde animations like Rocks in My Pockets. Here, animation becomes not only an entry into the world of crip filmmakers but also a means to evoke in spectators an alternative understanding and awareness of their own bodies. Greenberg subverts conventional perceptions of gaze- and able-centric spectatorship, and by rethinking both audio and visual pleasures, asks what happens if we sensory disorient and crip (blind, deaf) the spectator?

The book is erudite in execution, ASCA in spirit, and empathetic in its message: animated lived experiences and their innovative artistic forms, when confronted with critical disability studies perspective, give us a powerful tool to envision futures that will accommodate diverse bodyminds.

2024 ASCA Dissertation Award:  Shahin Nasiri

Rethinking Freedom from the Perspective of Refugees: Lived Experiences of (Un)freedom in Europe’s Border Zones

Shahin Nasiri’s thesis, “Rethinking Freedom from the Perspective of Refugees: Lived Experiences of (Un)freedom in Europe’s Border Zones,” speaks to a question that has long been at the center-stage of political theory and political philosophy: what is freedom? Where Shahin consolidates his groundbreaking contribution is in asking: what is freedom from the perspective of refugees, political subjects who have attempted to escape acute conditions of unfreedom? The question of freedom, Shahin argues, is at the heart of “every genuine inquiry into the meaning and significance of refugeehood.”

At stake in refugees’ aspirations of freedom and experiences of (un)freedom, Shahin argues, is a crucial epistemological and political issue: Eurocentric conceptions of freedom take racialized concepts of citizenship and statehood as prerequisites. In drawing out this epistemological limitation, Shahin argues that refugees are excluded not only from the domain of political membership, but also from any agential claims to freedom. In response and in challenge, Shahin pushes at the limits of the concept of freedom. How can the very nature of freedom be rearticulated, Shahin asks, by taking as a paradigm the lived experience and perspectives of refugees? Rather than simply taking refugeehood as a state of unfreedom, the thesis asks to understand “the heterogenous practices and projects of freedom that are expressed in [refugees’] lived experiences of flight and practices against acts of border making.”

This project is much more than one that champions for the cause of refugees in today’s time of increasing political polarization and indifference, particularly in the Global North, to the plight of refugees who are seen either as abject subjects in need of protection or as disruptive “enemy-like strangers.” Shahin’s work is a theoretical and philosophical undertaking, as much as it is an ethically driven one. The interpretive phenomenological method that Shahin takes up and further develops through his interviews with in-flight refugees in Lesvos and other parts of Greece allows for a paradigmatic development of a concept of freedom from the lived experiences of refugees. This we might say, is a powerful example of what a decolonial theoretical practice might look like. The concept of freedom receives its critical substance as entangled with and constructed through the refugees’ everyday practices of being in community: navigating abandonment, making friends, sharing resources, etc., from outside of the hegemonic frameworks and privileges of citizenship and state-membership.

Subsequently, Shahin’s project poses a timely challenge and offers a corrective to the paradoxes of un-freedom implicit in human rights discourses. It further contributes to broadens critical theoretical discourses on solidarity, community, political friendship. The committee particularly noted Shahin’s warm and solidary handling of complex theoretical material alongside sensitive personal narratives of refugees, to advance a thoughtful and nuanced rethinking of the concept of freedom.

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PhD thesis proposal: The Refugee Dilemma: Syrian Refugees' Effects on Labor Markets, and Socio- Cultural Stabilities in Germany, and Turkey

Wars, revolutions, and natural disasters will inevitably lead to the emergence of refugees and IDPs. During critical situations, their numbers are fluctuating from the millions to tens of millions of people (as it happened during years of the First and Second World Wars). Nowadays, globalization has allowed a large number of refugees, and IDPs to move over long distances with the use of modern means of transports. Among other things, it had just transferred problems of third world countries to the developed countries, where the legal standards do not allow adequate ways of dealing with them. Current UN statistics, are significantly underestimated, according to competent experts, determines the number of refugees and IDPs is about 22 million. And this number is growing, and in the long-term trend, it is clearly negative. The unsafe situation in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern states forces local people to migrate to better places of living. The majority of these refugees are Syrian asylum seekers who escaped from the Civil war in Syria. Syrian refugees mostly choose to migrate to states like Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Germany, etc. However, such refugee flow doesn’t have the same impact in the host countries equally, it differs depending on development, demographic situation, and a list of other factors of the state. Therefore, the chosen case of differentials of refugee flow impacts in German, and Turkish socio-cultural values, and labor markets is very interesting. Germany has hosted 484,000 asylum seekers, whereas as a frontline state in Turkey this number is fluctuating around 2,620,553. Although, the refugee flows have different impacts on these countries.

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Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh Pressured to Join Myanmar’s Civil War

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Rohingya youth in refugee camps in Bangladesh face intimidation and forced recruitment by gangs, coercing them to join the very army that uprooted them.

A Myanmar police officer stands on a road as they provide security at a checkpoint in Buthidaung, Rakhine State, western Myanmar on May 28, 2017.

After the midday prayers on a hot Wednesday, Hussain* was summoned by an armed group to a “community meeting” in his block within the world’s largest refugee settlement.

“They want us to go and fight in Myanmar,” Hussain said. “They are gathering all the young men in the Rohingya community and forcing them to join the Myanmar military against the Arakan Army.”

“We don’t want to go, but they are threatening us daily. It is more terrifying than ever to be in camp right now.”

Since May 15, armed Rohingya nationalist groups have been holding community meetings throughout the 33-camp refugee settlement in Bangladesh, intensifying efforts to recruit young Rohingya males for military service in Myanmar, targeting boys as young as 14.

“The situation deteriorates by the day,” said Mahmudul*, a Rohingya humanitarian worker living in Kutupalong Camp. 

“The gang conducts arrests around the clock, targeting anyone, particularly volunteer workers from our community, such as teachers and humanitarian aid workers. They have been organizing meetings in every camp for this purpose.”

Since 2021, following the military’s seizure of power through a coup, Myanmar has been embroiled in a brutal civil war, resulting in the loss of thousands of civilian lives. As 2023 saw a steady increase in fighting between the military junta and ethnic armed groups and resistance forces, the Myanmar junta has sought recruits from the Rohingya population it has persecuted and denied citizenship to for decades. 

“Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, already facing immense hardship, are now targeted for forced recruitment by the military through their proxies,” said Htway Lwin, a Rohingya human rights activist and community leader based in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

Several young men have fled the camp to evade recruitment, while others have relocated to the shelters of family and friends located in the Registered Refugee Camp settlement, which is purportedly facing fewer gang-related activities.

“Women and men stay awake at night, remaining alert as they fear their sons will be taken and forced to fight in Myanmar,” said Mohammed Younus* of Camp 4. 

The Diplomat documented four cases of forced recruitment and interviewed 19 Rohingya residents of Kutupalong Camp in Bangladesh. Family members of those recruited reported that their loved ones were taken from the camp and transported to Rakhine State. Similar accounts of forced recruitment have been documented by AFP .

One brother of a recruited young male shared that he has been in contact with his brother, who says he has started military training in Rakhine State to fight against the Arakan Army. 

“There are many people whose family members were taken forcibly and still there is no news of them. Their parents have been looking for them everywhere but there is no news,” said Kyaw Myint Aung* of Camp 4.

“Some say that they are now in Myanmar and undergoing military training. Others say they are in the Bandarban district of Bangladesh, near the border with Myanmar.”

Over 500 Rohingya refugees have reportedly been pressured by armed groups to join the ongoing war in Myanmar since May, according to Radio Free Asia , a regional news service. 

Those who refuse recruitment and assistance to the junta in Rakhine State face beatings and, in some instances, fatal consequences. Other sources share accounts of family members who refused recruitment attempts being detained and then forcefully taken to Myanmar to fight.

Forced recruitment has profoundly affected the lives of Rohingya in Kutupalong Camp, exacerbating their already dire circumstances.

Many Rohingya working with humanitarian organizations cannot go to work due to the high risk, shared Samina Islam*, a humanitarian worker living in the Rohingya Registered Refugee Camp. Samina said the armed groups have also been setting fires in some camps to intimidate the community. 

“People are now afraid to leave home,” says Samina Islam, “We can’t sleep well and there are often gunshots heard after dark… The gangs take people mostly at night, but sometimes during the daytime too, so we can never feel safe.”

The armed groups are pitching recruitment to fight the Arakan Army using promises of citizenship and coercion through threats of abduction, beatings, and repercussions on one’s family. 

In Rakhine State, where coerced recruitment of Rohingya men has been ongoing since February, the junta government has failed to provide citizenship cards to any Rohingya military recruits, despite their earlier promises to do so.

The factions driving recruitment in the camp say that the Rohingya must forge alliances with the Myanmar army, an old enemy, to confront the new threat of the Arakan Army.

Nearly 1 million people live in the Cox’s Bazar camps, according to the United Nations . Recent accounts from the Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Cox’s Bazar echo reports of coerced recruitment akin to those witnessed this year in Rakhine State, perpetrated by Rohingya nationalist groups. 

Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, Mar. 24, 2017. Photo by John Owens/VOA.

Over 1,000 Rohingya men in Rakhine State, Myanmar have been abducted and forcibly recruited by the Myanmar military to fight on its behalf against the Arakan Army (AA), an insurgent force. Rohingya men and their family members have faced beatings and arrest after refusing to comply with conscription and undertake military training to support the junta’s conflict in Rakhine State. To evade recruitment efforts, over 100,000 young men have fled their homes. 

The junta is applying a conscription law to recruit Rohingya young men to assist with their internal conflicts with other ethnic groups. However the law only applies to citizens of Myanmar, and is therefore violating international human rights law when applied to the Rohingya population – as the Rohingya have been denied citizenship in the country since the 1982 Citizenship Law was enacted.

“Myanmar’s military, which has committed atrocities against the Rohingya for decades while denying them citizenship, is now forcing them to fight on its behalf,” said Shayna Bauchner of Human Rights Watch.

Noor Kolima, a human rights defender residing in Kutupalong Camp, said the forced recruitment of youth for the Myanmar military is impacting all Rohingya residing in the camps in Bangladesh. Noor reports that the deteriorating situation is leaving Rohingya youth feeling increasingly unsafe.

Rohingya refugees interviewed for this story and reports from other news outlets accuse three armed groups – the Rohingya Salvation Organization (RSO), the Arakan Rohingya Army (ARA),  and Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army ( ARSA) – of coordinating recruitment efforts through widespread intimidation, threats of violence, and abduction. 

Gangs lack broad support among Rohingya in the camps, leading to escalating conflict between residents and gang members.

Mahmudul said that in many instances, residents of entire blocks, including women and children, have confronted armed RSO members in an effort to protect the young men in their families. 

Fires involving shelters and offices within Kutupalong Camp have been reported and verified. Many in Kutupalong allege that the fire outbreaks are a deliberate response to the unrest within camp, as the situation is pitting the armed groups against the wider Rohingya community, resulting in retribution and retaliation efforts. 

Suspicions and allegations that Bangladesh’s Armed Police Battalion is complicit in gang recruitment activities were widespread among interviewed Rohingya refugees. Rumors allege the Bangladeshi police are turning a blind eye to the violent and intimidating activities of the groups, failing to arrest the perpetrators, and even facilitating movement of Rohingya youth to the Myanmar border.

Gang violence between the RSO, ARA, and ARSA  is also increasing, adding to insecurity. The groups are in conflict, battling for control over different camps within the settlement. 

On June 10, a violent conflict erupted in Camp 4, resulting in the death of three RSO members at the hands of ARSA members.

The constant threat of abduction or violence has created a climate of fear and insecurity within the camps. The highly stressful environment is taking a significant toll on the community’s daily life, and physical and mental wellbeing.

Families are often compelled to act as unofficial security in their own blocks, staying vigilant to protect their loved ones. Guards have been hired in some blocks to maintain watch for threats to young men and adolescent boys in the camp.

MHM Kolim Ullah* from Camp 14 expressed, “The feeling of extreme stress and tension within the camp now makes it impossible for us to feel safe or envision a future.”

“I am always in danger,” said Kyaw Myint Aung, “There is no safety, no security… Now the refugee camp is like hell for innocent refugees.”

*Names have been changed in order to protect sources from reprisals.

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Mikhail Baryshnikov on Leaving Everything Behind

Fifty years ago, Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union. He discusses that day, the war in Ukraine and the challenges facing Russian artists today.

By Javier C. Hernández

On the night of June 29, 1974, after a performance with a touring Bolshoi Ballet troupe in downtown Toronto, Mikhail Baryshnikov made his way out a stage door, past a throng of fans and began to run.

Baryshnikov, then 26 and already one of ballet’s brightest stars, had made the momentous decision to defect from the Soviet Union and build a career in the West. On that rainy night, he had to evade K.G.B. agents — and audience members seeking autographs — as he rushed to meet a group of Canadian and American friends waiting in a car a few blocks away.

“That car took me to the free world,” Baryshnikov, 76, recalled in a recent interview. “It was the start of a new life.”

His cloak-and-dagger escape helped to make him a cultural celebrity . “Soviet Dancer in Canada Defects on Bolshoi Tour,” The New York Times declared on its front page.

But the focus on his decision to leave the Soviet Union has sometimes made Baryshnikov uneasy. He said he does not like how the term “defector” sounds in English, conjuring an image of a traitor who has committed high treason.

“I’m not a defector — I’m a selector,” he said. “That was my choice. I selected this life.”

Baryshnikov was born in Soviet-occupied Riga, Latvia, and moved to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1964, when he was 16, to study with the renowned teacher Alexander Pushkin . When he was 19, he joined the Kirov Ballet, now known as the Mariinsky, and quickly became a star on the Russian ballet scene.

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