Migrant Agency and the Country of Origin in the Return Regime. The Case of State-Induced Return from Germany to The Gambia

MIGRANT AGENCY AND THE COUNTRY OF ORIGIN IN THE RETURN REGIME The Case of State-Induced Return from Germany to The Gambia Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades Doktorin der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) des Fachbereichs Kulturund Sozialwissenschaften der Universität Osnabrück vorgelegt von Judith Altrogge aus Berg. Gladbach Osnabrück, im Juni 2025 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the contested field of return migration through the lens of migrant agency and transnational migratory and political dynamics between Germany and The Gambia. It focuses on state-induced return – deportation and Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) – and the socio-political reconfigurations it triggers for migrants and the country to which they (potentially) return. The study is motivated by two interlinked developments: first, the increasing political and administrative efforts of European states and Germany in particular to enforce return, and second, the shift in political opportunity structures in origin countries, for example when undergoing democratic transition. The case of The Gambia, following the fall of long-term dictators Yahya Jammeh in 2016, offers a critical context in which these developments converge. The dissertation addresses the overarching research question: How do migrants facing stateinduced return develop and navigate socio-political agency in the transnational migration regime? It explores (1) which forms of migrant agency emerge in the face of state-induced return; (2) how migrants position themselves vis-à-vis the institutional, discursive, and practical configurations of the return regime; and (3) how these migrant positions influence political dynamics in The Gambia. The study thereby seeks to recentre return migration studies on the post-return context and to foreground the agency of migrants and origin-state actors within transnational migration governance. Theoretically, the study draws on a power-sensitive migration regime perspective, further developed through insights from structuration theory, especially Margaret Archer’s distinction between primary and corporate agency. It integrates debates on return voluntariness, development, and political remittances, while also critically engaging with the dominant policy paradigm of reintegration. Conceptually, the dissertation proposes the notion of the return regime that is distinct from migration regimes and deportation regimes as it incorporates postreturn dynamics and their entanglements with development cooperation, origin-state politics, and multi-sited migrant activism. Empirically, the study is based on a longitudinal, multi-sited qualitative case study of return migration between Germany and The Gambia. Data were collected through over 115 qualitative interviews with migrants, state and other administrative actors, and civil society representatives in both countries. The core of the empirical research includes follow-up interviews with migrants who returned from Germany via deportation or AVRR over a 2.5-year period, complemented by participant observation, document analysis, and media materials. This temporal approach allows the dissertation to trace evolving trajectories of return and capture the ways in which migrants navigate or contest their returns within the regime over time, and how changing political dynamics shape their positionings. The case of The Gambia is analytically significant due to the simultaneity of democratic transition and intensified return enforcement by Germany. It provides a ‘crucial case’ to test competing claims within the return-development nexus and to examine how origin-state sovereignty is negotiated under conditions of geopolitical asymmetry. The study identifies iv moments of corporate migrant agency both before and after return, including a high-profile deportation moratorium enacted by the Gambian government following transnational migrant protest. At the same time, the research reveals limited transformative agency among migrants returned from Germany themselves, many of whom struggle with stigma, economic hardship, and exclusion despite reintegration assistance. The dissertation consists of a cumulative body of five academic publications. These address (1) the differentiated political influence of two specific groups of migrants; (2) trajectories after state-induced return and the identification of AVRR as ‘slow deportation’; (3) the transnational political remittances of migrants’ anti-deportation activism; (4) the notion of ‘protective exclusion’ through the Gambian state as a postcolonial sovereignty strategy; and (5) methodological and ethical reflections on longitudinal post-deportation research. These are synthesized in this framework paper and discussed in the shared contexts of migrant agency, development, and the return regime. Overall, the dissertation challenges the normative assumptions embedded in return and reintegration policies. It demonstrates how migrant agency is shaped by structural constraints, how origin states navigate conflicting pressures in migration cooperation, and how return is not simply the closure of migration but a deeply politicized and contested constant in the return regime. By repositioning return migration as a transnational field of struggle, the study advances regime theory, contributes to critical migration and development research, and opens new avenues for postcolonial engagement with migration governance. Keywords: return migration, migration regime, Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR), deportation, return-development nexus, migrant agency, political remittances, The Gambia v ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Diese Dissertation untersucht das umkämpfte Feld der Rückkehrmigration aus der Perspektive migrantischer Handlungsfähigkeit sowie transnationaler migrationsund politischer Dynamiken zwischen Deutschland und Gambia. Im Fokus stehen staatlich induzierte Rückkehrprozesse – Abschiebung sowie freiwillige Rückkehr und Reintegration (Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration, AVRR) – sowie deren sozialpolitische Auswirkungen auf Migrant*innen und das Land, in das sie (potenziell) zurückkehren. Zwei miteinander verknüpfte Entwicklungen bilden den Ausgangspunkt der Studie: erstens die zunehmenden politischen und administrativen Anstrengungen europäischer Staaten und der EU, insbesondere Deutschlands, Rückkehr stärker durchzusetzen, und zweitens sich verändernde politische Möglichkeitsstrukturen in Herkunftsstaaten, etwa im Zuge demokratischer Übergangsprozesse. Der Fall Gambia, wo 2016 der langjährige Diktator Yahya Jammeh gestürzt und eine demokratische Übergangsregierung eingesetzt wurde, bietet einen analytisch aufschlussreichen Kontext, in dem sich diese Dynamiken überschneiden. Die Dissertation geht der übergeordneten Forschungsfrage nach: Wie entwickeln und navigieren Migrant*innen, die von staatlich induzierter Rückkehr betroffen sind, sozialpolitische Handlungsfähigkeit (Agency) im transnational Migrationsregime? Konkret wird untersucht: (1) Welche Formen migrantischer Handlungsfähigkeit entstehen angesichts staatlicher Rückkehranordnungen? (2) Wie positionieren sich Migrant*innen gegenüber den institutionellen, diskursiven und praktischen Konfigurationen des Rückkehrregimes? und (3) Welche politischen Dynamiken im Herkunftsland beeinflussen diese migrantischen Positionierungen, und wie wirken diese wiederum auf diese Dynamiken zurück? Die Studie zielt damit auf eine Rezentrierung der Rückkehrforschung auf den zeitlichen und räumlichen Kontext nach der Rückkehr und rückt migrantische sowie herkunftsstaatliche Akteur*innen stärker ins Zentrum transnationaler Migrationsregime. Theoretisch basiert die Arbeit auf einer machtsensiblen Perspektive auf Migrationsregime, erweitert um Einsichten aus der Strukturierungstheorie, insbesondere Margaret Archers Unterscheidung zwischen primärer und korporativer Handlungsfähigkeit. Sie greift Debatten zu Rückkehr-Freiwilligkeit, staatlicher Entwicklung und politischen Remittances auf und setzt sich kritisch mit dem dominanten Reintegrationsparadigma in der Rückkehrpolitik auseinander. Konzeptionell schlägt die Dissertation das Konzept eines eigenständigen Rückkehrregimes vor, das sich von Migrationsund Abschieberegimen abhebt, indem es die zeitliche und räumliche Dimension nach der Rückkehr sowie die dortigen Verflechtungen des Rückkehrregimes mit anderen politischen Relevanzen, Entwicklungszusammenarbeit sowie transnationalem migrantischem Aktivismus einbezieht. Empirisch basiert die Arbeit auf einer longitudinal angelegten, multi-sited qualitativen Fallstudie zur Rückkehrmigration zwischen Deutschland und Gambia. Die Datenerhebung umfasst über 115 qualitative Interviews mit Migrant*innen, staatlichen und administrativen Akteur*innen sowie Vertreter*innen der Zivilgesellschaft in beiden Ländern. Im Zentrum steht eine mehrwellige Interviewstudie mit Rückkehrern aus Deutschland (Abschiebung und AVRR), die über einen Zeitraum von 2,5 Jahren begleitet wurden. Ergänzend wurden vi teilnehmende Beobachtung, Dokumentenanalysen und Medienquellen herangezogen. Der Zeitsensible Zugang erlaubt es, die zeitliche Komplexität von Rückkehrverläufen zu erfassen, Positionierungen von Migrant*innen im Rückkehrregime nachzuzeichnen und deren Aushandlungen im Licht sich gleichzeitig verändernder politischer Dynamiken zu analysieren. Der Fall Gambia ist analytisch besonders relevant aufgrund des gleichzeitigen Auftretens eines demokratischen Übergangs und einer zunehmenden Rückkehrdurchsetzung seitens Deutschlands. Die Fallstudie bietet somit einen ‘crucial case’, um konkurrierende Annahmen im Rückkehr-Entwicklungs-Nexus zu prüfen und die Aushandlung herkunftsstaatlicher Souveränität unter geopolitischen Asymmetrien zu analysieren. Die Studie identifiziert Momente migrantischer korporativer Handlungsfähigkeit vor und nach der Rückkehr – darunter ein vielbeachtetes Abschiebemoratorium der gambischen Regierung infolge transnationaler migrantischer Proteste. Gleichzeitig zeigt sie die begrenzte transformative Handlungsfähigkeit unter Rückkehrern aus Deutschland auf, die trotz Reintegrationsunterstützung mit Stigmatisierung, wirtschaftlichen Schwierigkeiten und gesellschaftlichem Ausschluss zu kämpfen haben. Die kumulative Dissertation basiert auf fünf wissenschaftlichen Veröffentlichungen, die in diesem Rahmenpapier zusammengeführt und diskutiert werden: (1) zur unterschiedlichen politischen Einflussnahme zweier migrantischer Gruppen; (2) zu Lebensverläufen nach staatlich induzierter Rückkehr und der Identifikation von AVRR als ‚langsamer Abschiebung‘; (3) zu den politischen Remittances von migrantischem transnationalem Aktivismus gegen Abschiebung; (4) zur Strategie der ‚protektiven Exklusion‘ als postkoloniale Souveränitätspraxis der gambischen Regierung; und (5) zu methodischen und ethischen Reflektionen über longitudinale Abschiebeforschung. Diese Beiträge werden im Rahmenpapier systematisch mit Bezug auf migrantische Handlungsfähigkeit, Entwicklung(-szusammenarbeit) und Rückkehrregimen verortet und diskutiert. Insgesamt hinterfragt die Dissertation normative Annahmen in Rückkehrund Reintegrationspolitiken. Sie zeigt, wie migrantische Handlungsspielräume strukturell begrenzt sind, wie Herkunftsstaaten zwischen internationalen Rückkehranforderungen und innenpolitischer Legitimität navigieren, und wie Rückkehr nicht als Abschluss, sondern als umkämpftes und politisiertes Moment in einem sich etablierenden Politikfeld verstanden werden muss. Indem Rückkehrmigration als transnationales Konfliktfeld neu positioniert wird, leistet die Studie einen Beitrag zur Regimetheorie, zur kritischen Migrationsund Entwicklungsforschung sowie zur postkolonialen Analyse internationaler Migrationspolitik. Schlagwörter: Rückmigration, Migrationsregime, freiwillige Rückkehr und Reintegration, Abschiebung, Rückkehr-Entwicklungs-Nexus, migrantische Handlungsfähigkeit, Gambia vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first and deepest thanks go to the many informants who shared their perspectives, networks, and expertise with me – especially those returned migrants who let me become part of their lives during unsettling times. Many of them might never know how important their contribution was for me both personally and professionally, and I will remain deeply indebted to them. I owe sincere thanks to my supervisors, Prof. Dr. Helen Schwenken and Prof. Dr. Andreas Mehler, for their attentive, constructive, and trusting guidance. I also thank my colleagues at IMIS. I particularly thank my TRANSMIT fellows, Philipp Jung and Hamza Safouane, as well as Julia Stier from WZB Berlin, who not only gave valuable academic inspiration and advice but also patiently put up with my changing tempers and communicative needs. Thanks for hanging in there together, despite the odds. Dear fellow doctoral students from the Forschungswerkstatt Migration und Gesellschaft, thank you for the inspiring and motivating conversations and your valuable feedback on my work. Another important thank you goes to Dominique Haas, who contributed a clear vision in an otherwise largely lonely analysis process. I would further like to thank the ABI for teaching me collegial spirit, critical engagement with North-South relations and the love for longitudinal regional involvement. As the “Patterns of (Forced) Migration” cluster and the MEDAM research team shaped my scholarly perspective, thanks go to Kwaku Arhin-Sam, Leonie Jegen and City Wetterich for your encouraging collegiality and inspirational work. Outstanding Franzisca Zanker, my deepest gratitude goes to you for your inspiring scholarly enthusiasm and creativity, for believing in the importance of my academic contribution, for your patience, and, most importantly, your friendship. Further heartfelt thanks go to the many fellow ‘experts’ I exchanged with in or about The Gambia. I would not have been able to get to know and understand the context without your help, Omar Cham, Lamin M. Darboe, Sanna Camara, Jimmy Nzally, and Yahya Sonko, among others. You have helped me find the red threads that hold my work together. Small remarks and gestures can sometimes have a great impact. I am grateful to Martin Adelmann, Moritz Köster, and Benjamin Schütze for their timely comments in early times that dispelled my initial hesitations to pursue a dissertation. Further thanks go to Cathy Conrad Suso, whose comments re-established trust in myself in specific times in need. I would also like to thank the team from the Graduate School of Social Sciences (G3S) at the University of Basel for a start-up scholarship to the PhD, and especially Elísio Macamo for his early supervision and intellectual inspiration at the time. Beyond academia, thanks go to all my friends who have supported me by asking and listening, thinking of and caring for me during this long phase of persistent insecurity and research loneliness. Particular gratitude go to Lena Hartmann and her family for the cabin exile package, to Sarah Holtkamp for keeping my sociological heart alive, to Nicole Müller for your encouraging dissertation path, to Dominik Klapdor and Anke Wiedemann for your enduring commitment and genuine interest in me as a working and thinking person. viii I further thank my daughter Lorin for sharing me with a PhD project during some early years of her life. I trust that you are going to understand why I devoted all this time and attention to it despite the tempting distractions of a more comfortable life outside the office. Thank you to Gareth Hopkins for walking with me through the emotional highs and especially the lows of this research journey. Without your willingness to accommodate my working conditions and your flexible care work, this dissertation would not have been possible. I am also thankful to my mother-in-law, Helen Wasshuber, for her supportive care work during my field stays. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Birgit and Georg Altrogge, for their unwavering love and support throughout every stage of this process and on all my journeys, and for teaching me to appreciate, question and look beyond my coincidental privileges. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. vii List of Tables ............................................................................................................................. xi List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... xi List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ xii 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 2 Return Migration and Migrant Agency in Academic Debates ......................................... 4 2.1 The Migration Regime Perspective and the Return Regime ............................................ 8 2.2 Migrant Agency in the Return Regime ........................................................................... 12 2.3 Democratization, Return, and Political Development .................................................... 17 2.3.1 The Impact of Ending Authoritarianism on Return Migration .................................. 18 2.3.2 The Potential Positive Benefits of Return Migration on Political Development ....... 19 2.4 State-Induced Return: Between Development and Externalization of Border Control .. 21 2.4.1 AVRR: A Migration Management Tool in Development Cooperation ..................... 22 2.4.2 Debates over the Return-Development Nexus and ‘Reintegration’ in AVRR .......... 24 2.5 The Origin Country in the Return Regime ..................................................................... 28 3 The Gambia: Migration and Return ............................................................................... 32 3.1 Gambian Migration: An Overview ................................................................................. 35 3.1.1 Western Destinations ................................................................................................. 37 3.1.2 Reasons to leave ......................................................................................................... 38 3.1.3 Gambian Migrants’ Legal Status in Europe ............................................................... 39 3.2 Return to The Gambia ..................................................................................................... 40 3.2.1 State-Induced Returns from Germany to The Gambia .............................................. 41 3.2.2 Perceptions of Return in The Gambia and the Country’s Development Agenda ...... 43 4 Methodology and Data ...................................................................................................... 48 4.1 Methodological Considerations about Employing a Case Study .................................... 48 4.2 Methodological Considerations over the Role of Passing Time ..................................... 50 4.2.1 Studying a ‘Moving Target’ ....................................................................................... 50 4.2.2 Longitudinal Data Collection and Temporality as an Analytic Lens ......................... 51 4.3 Choice of Methods, Informant Sampling, and Recruitment ........................................... 52 4.4 Data and Methods ........................................................................................................... 54 4.4.1 Interview Data ............................................................................................................ 54 4.4.2 Participant Observation .............................................................................................. 57 4.4.3 Documents and Social Media .................................................................................... 57 4 management and the power asymmetries contained therein also plays a role in these transnational mechanisms of action, as I problematize in a methodological article. As I will make clear in the following discussions of the state of research and theory, my results therefore lie at the intersection of development and democracy studies and migration studies. The ‘case’ of The Gambia offered and actually demanded this dual perspective due to the rearrangement of the socio-political constellation it was in with regards to its political system, emigration patterns, and geopolitical relations. My analyses can further be insightful for other cases in which this constellation undergoes changes, such as Syria. This framework paper is structured as follows: Section 2 offers a literature discussion that maps the multidimensionality of return and situates my approach within relevant empirical and theoretical research strands. The section closes with a summary table outlining the key themes and research gaps to which this dissertation contributes. Section 3 provides a thematic introduction to The Gambia, linking the country’s political history with its migration dynamics, politics, and migration-related discourses. It also includes statistical accounts of migration from The Gambia and state-induced return to The Gambia. Section 4 gives an account of and reflects on the methodology and data underlying my research. Sections 5 and 6 form the analytical core of this dissertation: Section 5 presents the findings of my study by summarizing the five publications that make up this cumulative dissertation and closes with an overview table of the publications. Section 6 synthesizes the key insights and discusses their contribution to the three main scholarly fields to which my work speaks. Section 7 concludes with reflections on the dissertation experience and overall findings. 2 RETURN MIGRATION AND MIGRANT AGENCY IN ACADEMIC DEBATES Return has always been part of the migratory imaginary, yet its conceptual and empirical relevance in migration studies has only increased and diversified in recent years. This evolution reflects broader shifts in how migration is experienced, governed and theorized. In the early phases of migration research, return was largely treated as the assumed endpoint of a linear migration cycle, either marking personal success – mainly after economic migration – or policy closure – often after conflict. More recently, it has emerged as a site of contestation over border control, development paradigms, and migrant agency. Against this backdrop, this section introduces key debates that have shaped the study of return migration, emphasizing how return has come to be conceptualized and governed across time and space. I focus on scholarship that has influenced my thinking about return, as a process situated within transnational migration regimes, shaped by policy, social relations, and contested knowledge production. In particular, I describe how concepts of voluntariness, development, and migrant agency have been problematized over time, and how these debates have led to differentiated, partly contested, framings. My approach builds on and contributes to the growing body of work that considers return not as the end of migration, but as a politically and socially embedded process in which migrants, states and institutions interact across borders. To start with, I locate my research within the developments of the return migration research field more broadly. 5 Firstly, my research builds on the formation of the return research field that has come to find its main concern in the constrained voluntariness of return mobility. This research emphasis is contingent, and resonates with the social and political contexts in which it developed. In early migration research, when considered at all, return was seen as the natural and expected end point of a migration trajectory. This perspective reflected dominant state-centred understandings of migration as a linear process that concluded with reintegration into the society of origin. One of the most widely cited early definitions comes from George Gmelch, who described return as “the movement of migrants back to their homelands to resettle” (Gmelch 1980, 136). This conceptualization positioned return as temporally and spatially separated from migration itself, and framed largely through the lens of individual choice. In early approaches, return was primarily analysed regarding personal motivations, aspirations, and experiences. This tendency reflected the empirical realities of many return flows in the 1960s and 1970s, which occurred under relatively non-coercive condition, before the state became more active in return governance. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars began developing typologies to better differentiate between return experiences: by duration (temporary vs. permanent), by motivation (voluntary vs. involuntary), and by impact (successful vs. failed). A key early contribution came from Francesco Cerase (1974), whose typology focused on motivations behind return and linked them to social positions and relations to the home context. He distinguished between returns of failure, conservatism, retirement, and innovation. His typology demonstrated that return is not a monolithic event but must be differentiated by intent and socio-economic background. Much of this early literature was mainly concerned with the causes and decision factors creating return migration. Considering the growing complexity and politicization of return in the 1990s, its conceptualization was underdeveloped (King 2000). Russell King highlighted the need for a more systematic understanding not only of return’s forms, but also its outcomes. His work helped consolidate return as a distinct field and encouraged scholars to examine the effects of return migration on both individuals and the societies to which they returned, already noting that research found mixed, often complicated, effects despite prevailing optimism. This optimism was embedded in a broader research context shaped by normative development framings that cast return migrants as “developers” (Åkesson & Eriksson Baaz 2015). Jean-Pierre Cassarino (2004) responded with a model of return preparedness that shifted attention from individual motivations to structural conditions. His framework distinguishes between complete, incomplete and interrupted migration cycles, offering a flexible model that accommodates and compares more and less voluntary returns. He grounds his argument in the notion that migrants prepare for return with a view to future success and potential transformation in the country of origin/return. The model accordingly accounts for migrants’ varying opportunities to mobilize resources, choose the timing of return, and the structural conditions in both countries of destination and origin/return. As he writes, “we still need to know who returns when, and why; and why some returnees appear as actors of change, in specific social and institutional circumstances at home, whereas others do not” (Cassarino 2004, 253). This shift toward processual and relational understandings of return emerged as scholars 6 began to take more seriously the uneven opportunities migrants face and the importance of prior experiences and accumulated capital in shaping return outcomes. Cassarino’s approach can also be understood as a reaction to the political dynamics around return at the time, as the governance of migration became increasingly entangled with questions of security, legality, and border control, particularly from the 1990s onwards, with the notion of voluntariness in return coming under intensified scrutiny. As part of this, AVRR programmes that had been created in the 1990s were scaled up and institutionalized across the Global North (see also Sub-section 2.4). The legal and policy frameworks thus increasingly relied on the distinction between “forced” and “voluntary” return, while research, with Cassarino’s work as a theoretical cornerstone, started engaging with the analytical flaws and political bias of this binary. State-induced return, which reaches from highly enforced deportations to stateincentivized AVRR (Koch 2014), exemplifies the contradictions of the binary framing. Migrants who are pressured to leave due to irregular legal statuses or the threat of detention may formally consent to return, but under conditions that are far from freely chosen. Scholars such as Barak Kalir (2017) or Laura Cleton and Sébastian Chauvin (2020) have shown how this kind of institutionalized pressure can produce coerced voluntariness, where migrants technically agree to return but do so within structurally constrained decision spaces. These stateinduced returns thus call for the question how more or less voluntary they are in comparison to non-state-induced returns, and which effect this dichotomy has for the migrants and the context into which they return. Research agendas thus more and more turned to return migration with a lens on state-induced return, disaggregating coercion and involuntariness. Notably, from a theoretical perspective on return voluntariness, even in “regular and liquid migration contexts” (Erdal & Oeppen 2022, 74), such as within the European Union, the decision to return is rarely free from any constraint. However, involuntariness created by legal, political and administrative forces are often felt, and defined, more as a coercion than others such as family obligations, or work contracts that demand a migrant’s return. Accordingly, the present scholarly and societal understandings of return in/voluntariness mainly relate to politically created legal categorizations (Erdal & Oeppen 2022), as does also my focus. Secondly, my research engages with a tension in migration research that is related to transnationalism. Parallel to the developments outlined above, the social sciences underwent a transnational turn: a significant theoretical and methodological expansion shaped by ongoing processes of globalisation, and their scholarly observations and reflections. From the 2000s onward, the boundedness of nation-state categories and even relevance was questioned. In this, return was reconceptualised as one moment in a wider set of cross-border relationships (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002). Work on transnationalism emphasized how migrants maintain ties, identities, and responsibilities across multiple localities. In this understanding, return is often provisional or partial, undertaken temporarily, or accompanied by intentions to re-migrate, emphasizing the broader spectrum of return duration. Studies on the “myth of return” (e.g. Sinatti 2011; Bolognani 2015) indicate the omnipresence of return in migrant imaginaries even when actual return never occurs. Other works have examined the fluidity of 7 return decision-making in the face of shifting opportunities, risks and obligations (e.g. Black et al. 2004; Borneman 2004; Flahaux 2017; Iaria 2011) as well as temporary migration biographies and transnational livelihoods (e.g. Faist, Fauser & Reisenauer 2013). These perspectives emerged as researchers began to see migrants not only as individuals moving between places but as actors embedded in sustained transnational fields, challenging prior assumptions of linearity and fixity. Yet, such transnational emphases stand in tension with the linear, state-centric imaginaries that had emerged in parallel in migration policy and, later, research on the prominent role of reintegration in state-induced return (see also Sub-section 2.4.4). While transnational approaches emphasize fluidity, state-induced return concepts build on an envisaged closure. This disjuncture is of course not merely academic. It rather reflects how return is experienced and governed on a very wide spectrum which often neglects migrant aspirations in our increasingly inter-connected world and its promises of transnational livelihoods, allowing access to those only for some. My work on return as a transnational regime process engages precisely with this tension: by treating return as embedded in transnational fields of power and negotiation, I seek to capture both the structural constraints imposed by states and the multilayered transnational entanglements and strategies of affected migrants when they respond and shape their migration experiences within this. Thirdly, my work therefore critically engages with the embeddedness of the return research field in policy-oriented narratives that link return to development. This nexus has become increasingly prominent since the late 1980s to early 1990s, when return migration, as laid out earlier, was cast as an opportunity for migrants to contribute to the economic and social advancement of their countries of origin/return. Already in the earlier typologies by Cerase (1974) or Gmelch (1980), return migration was seen as potentially producing resources, ideas and ambitions that could impact the societies they returned to, particularly in Cerase’s notion of the “return of innovation”. With rising policy interest, these rather descriptive observations were increasingly reframed through a normative lens. Return began to be promoted not just as an outcome, but as a desirable instrument of development policy, especially in regions of migrant origin. This policy framing has since shaped not only governance practices but also certain strands of academic work that aligned more closely with policy agendas, partly as efforts to produce applicable knowledge. Notably, even Cassarino’s model of return preparedness carries the notion of future orientation of the returning migrants as a potential gain for the countries of origin/return, with structural conditions supporting or impeding this. Summing up, these broad strands of scholarship highlight how voluntariness exists on a contested spectrum, shaped by mismatches between policy categories and lived experiences as well as normative concerns with the instrumentalisation of migrant consent and individual return motivation. As return has become central to migration governance, it is essential to engage with these problematic circumstances. In the following literature discussion, I build on these insights to further contextualize my research and clarify the gaps it addresses. I begin by introducing the migration regime perspective as an overarching conceptual framework (2.1). Building on this, I turn to migrant agency and present theoretical accounts of Margaret Archer 8 that help distinguish why migrant agency does or does not become effective in the return context according to my observations (2.2). I then discuss how return intersects with democratization and political development as important social and political processes negotiated at the same time (2.3). I then critically assess how AVRR as one form of stateinduced return has become conceptually and politically entangled with development agendas in countries of origin/return (2.4), including an examination of the concept of reintegration as a biased geopolitical concept mainly transporting interests of migrant-returning destination regions. Lastly, I address the relative neglect of origin states in academic analyses of the return regime and identify key exceptions that provide a foundation for my own approach, to which I count my own approach (2.5). 2.1 The Migration Regime Perspective and the Return Regime As explained in the introduction, the central concern of my work is how migrants seek and manage to establish influence over political institutions that shape, enforce and govern return. More specifically, I examine how migrants position themselves in relation to institutional actors, particularly state authorities, that see themselves as sovereign decision-makers in migration control. In the case study, this process broadly started with increased Gambian immigration to Germany, where Gambian nationals entered the asylum system but of which most were only granted short-term legal residence. From the perspective of political and administrative actors in Germany, these migrants’ longer-term presence was considered undesirable and – to various degrees – unlawful. They invoked national and international legal frameworks that they assumed were binding for the Gambian state (and migrated people) and sought to induce return – by incentivizing AVRR and by deportation. Underlying these efforts was a conviction that most targeted migrants would not return without inducement or effective pressure. German authorities assumed they had the necessary tools to effect these returns: negotiation leverage, financial means, administrative control, and the power to define and institutionalize what constitutes a reasonable return process. To analyse this constellation – the interactions between migrants and political institutions – as one interrelated field, I build on the migration regime perspective. It allows me to capture their interplay not as isolated decisions or events, but as embedded in broader, evolving configurations of power, policy, and negotiations across borders. In the following, I introduce the emergence of the concept and explain why I rely on particular agency-based, powersensitive understandings of regimes, which give analytic space to negotiating practices and agency of more and less powerful actors. In my case, I could show how return is politically and socially produced, how different actors contest its terms, and how migrants’ actions have intersected and partly reshaped the institutional field in which they are governed. I then assess how the regime concept has been connected to the issue of return, and how these existing approaches relate to my work, which sets the scene for an alternative conceptualization of a return regime which I suggest in 6.1. The concept of migration regimes has established as one of the most popular ways to study and describe the relationships between migratory mobilities and states’ control efforts and mechanisms. As the concept has not developed into a harmonized understanding or analytical 9 application, it demands to be further theoretically clarified when applied. Therefore, I will in the following point out why and how the regime perspective is instructive for my dissertation project and in which directions my findings can inform theoretical debates that follow the regime concept. Migration gained momentum as a field of international politics in the context of rising global mobility from the late 20th century onward. As a result of globalization, politics is increasingly characterized by more decentral inter-state, regional up to global political mechanisms. In response, migration scholars needed conceptual tools that capture the complex relationships between cross-border movements and state control. The concept of regimes, developed in international relations theory during the late 1970s and early 1980s, offered one such tool. Stephen Krasner’s influential definition described a regime as a ‘‘set of implicit or explicit principles of norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner 1982, 186). Although promising in its ability to frame multi-actor coordination, this early regime theory largely assumed rational actors operating within cooperative international systems. It therefore underplayed the role of power, conflict, and asymmetry. These limitations were critiqued notably by James F. Keeley (1990), who called for a shift toward viewing regimes through the lens of contestation and resistance. From the late 1990s to early 2000s onward, migration scholars increasingly adopted and adapted the regime concept accordingly. The concept was not only taken up by scholars working in institutionalist traditions or international relations, but also by researchers inspired by Foucauldian and governmentality perspectives, who used it as a power-sensitive analytical lens (cf. Horvath, Kenneth, Amelina & Peters 2017). This led to a broad spectrum of regime approaches in migration studies, with some focusing on institutional coordination and legal frameworks, while others emphasize discursive practices, state rationalities, or the production of control. Despite their differences, these approaches share a concern with understanding how migration is shaped by the interplay between states, supranational organizations, and migrants themselves. In order to identify power asymmetries and struggles within international regimes, Keeley encouraged to “focus on contestation as an essential element of any theory of regimes” (Keeley 1990, 84). Drawing on Foucault’s work, he suggested a reconceptualization of regimes not as spaces of cooperation, but as orders emerging through “struggle and resistance” (Keeley 1990, 85). This shift is especially relevant for migration studies, where state control, bureaucratic conflict, and migrant agency interact dynamically and often in contradictory ways. A powersensitive turn was needed to grasp the “complex, contradictory, and contested nature of current migration politics” (Horvath, Amelina, and Peters 2017, 302). In line with this, Giuseppe Sciortino’s account of migration regimes places “generations of turf wars among bureaucracies” (Sciortino 2004, 32) at the centre of analysis. Building on this influential understanding, scholars of European migration governance have elaborated how powerful state and supranational actors establish migration and border regimes designed to defend migrant-exclusionary interests against perceived pressure from rising migration flows 10 (Forschungsgruppe “Transit Migration” 2007; Hess & Kasparek 2012). Applying the regime concept through largely ethnographic and discourse-analytical methods, these approaches focus on how control mechanisms are produced, enacted, and contested at the ground level. They reveal how institutions like the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex (Kasparek 2021) or the International Organization for Migration (IOM) (Geiger & Pécoud 2020) are not neutral administrative but active participants in shaping and enforcing regimes, often in interaction with and in opposition to migrant strategies. Such power-sensitive approaches to migration regimes are especially useful for my own work. The actions of the German state reflect a distinctively self-assured understanding of its right and capacity to exert influence within a migration regime that they understand in their particular interest. Their actions are mainly directed towards three audiences: their own electorate, the targeted migrants, and The Gambia as country of origin/return. My work focuses on the latter two, analysing how migrants and the country of origin/return act upon the return pressure invoked by the German state. By employing the regime perspective, I see the interactions of the involved stakeholders as a process of regime formation and (re)negotiation, where competing interests, hierarchies of power, and conflicting forms of knowledge intersect across borders and practice levels. While in this understanding, migrants receive an active role in the interactive formation of migration regimes, which stands against the tradition of analysing migration regimes with a rather structure-centred macro perspective that overemphasises the power of the more powerful state actors, I nonetheless do not lay sole focus on migrant activity. Works on migrant agency usually tend to neglect the political nature of migrant agency and its interactivity with the political sphere (Bakewell 2010; see also de Haas 2014 and Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino & Taylor 1993). My work seeks middle ground instead. I perceive migrants’ actions within the regime as one important part, while observing power formation at more macro levels in interaction with them. With this understanding of studying an interplay on various levels of agency, I follow the approach of Christoph Rass and Frank Wolff in their applicable usage of migration regimes as “model to describe and to understand a complex and decentralized power formation” (Rass & Wolff 2018, 44) at the meso-level which is created through the heterogeneous connections between the micro-level and the macro-level, with the latter including the norms, values and structures that shape the former. Their understanding offers a middle ground between a solely migrant-actor ethnographic perspective and a migration regime as a structural ‘outcome’ (Rass & Wolff 2018, 44). Albeit the boundaries of a regime always remain fuzzy, this approach helps to detect some processes of the regime production between actors on various levels. The role of knowledge is, in a Foucauldian perspective on migration regimes, another important aspect to the struggles around the shaping of (migration) regimes, which are understood as socially constructed and re-constructing. In order to remain power-sensitive, I consider who produces the knowledge and concepts incorporated in the dominant discourses, and how these suppress alternative knowledge or sideline contesting discourses. Academic knowledge creation is always also a power component in the agenda setting within a migration regime 11 (Horvath, Amelina & Peters 2017; Kasparek 2024; Rass & Wolff 2018). Scholars are often urged or motivated to produce knowledge that is applicable in the studied regime, or at least they have to work with social categories and terminologies that are politically (co-)produced (cf. Amelina & Faist 2012). According to Rass and Wolff, the power biases of knowledge creation inherent in migration regime analysis is connected to the colonial legacy of the knowledge-producing systems, which demands post-colonial critique: “One essential part of post-colonial critique is devoted to the acceptance of (geo-)political categories and differentiation as analytical units” (Rass & Wolff 2018, 43). Following this means to use research as reflexive counteracts that question descriptive terminologies manifested in migration studies and political concepts at the same time. This knowledge/power-sensitive notion becomes relevant, firstly, when I consider the Gambian state’s cooperation in migrant return. As we shall see, from a perspective of Gambian state and society, migrant return is inherently connected to questions of development and democratization in their own country – aspects for which there is limited to no space in the legitimization of state-enforced migrant return among the more powerful European and German political regime actors. I will go more into detail about the interlinkages of migrant return, development and democratization in Sub-section 2.3. For migration regime theory, this interlinkage with regimes acting in parallel – in this case, democratic development cooperation in the broadest sense – that might compete with regards to certain ascriptions toward actors and their role in the regime – in this case, returnees, poses an interesting question: How, where and through which mechanisms does the migration regime interact with such other regimes? Secondly, the knowledge/power-sensitive approach plays a role in my critical stance towards the dominance of the reintegration concept in post-return research, which I will further elaborate on in Sub-section 2.4. Lastly, I turn to the application of the regime perspective in the sub-field of migrant return, where it is also increasingly applied but in varying notions. Building on the power-sensitive understandings of Foucauldian regimes, Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz have discovered the emergence of a ‘deportation regime’ (De Genova & Peutz 2010). Their understanding of a deportation regime expands the migration or border regime in a temporal sense, manifesting deportability techniques of migrant alienation, exploitation and removal after migrants’ arrival in host states, after having managed to work their way through the exclusionary bordering practices of migration regimes. De Genova and Peutz’s conceptualization also goes beyond the European migration regime in a spatial sense, as they find the deportation regime to be “global” (De Genova & Peutz 2010, 3). With this, they characterize the deportation regime as the shared commitment of states worldwide to remove unwanted migrants and jointly develop according techniques to do so. In contrast to these universal observations in destination contexts, other scholars have analysed deportation regimes of single host states, such as the Netherlands (Cleton & Chauvin 2020), Norway (Karlsen 2016), or Switzerland (Piñeiro, Locher & Pasche 2022). In accordance with differing findings of those studies with a clear national focus, Arjen Leerkes and Marieke van Houte find that a global understanding of a deportation regime is misleading. They identified 12 themselves four different types of ‘post-arrival enforcement regimes’ in Europe alone (Leerkes & van Houte 2020). 3 With my works, I follow these spatially more nuanced analyses below the global and look at more case-specific creation dynamics. My conceptualization incorporates spatial diversity by emphasizing the span of the return regime beyond the destination context. In order to capture the regime in which deportation as one form of state-reduced return is enacted between Germany and The Gambia, we have to consider the interactive production of the regime between more and less powerful state actors in the destination country and the country of origin/return. Equally important is the impact of not only potentially returning migrants at the places of destination but also already-returned migrants in the country of return. Such a transnational regime creation has been neglected in deportation or other migration regime conceptualizations and analyses, and my work aims to overcome this gap. The following subsection shall give more theoretical foundation to my findings. 4 2.2 Migrant Agency in the Return Regime As indicated repeatedly, a power-sensitive approach to migration regimes requires a particular consideration of agency, which has fallen short in structure-focused analyses of migration regimes in the past (cf. Benz & Schwenken 2005), especially regarding the role of migrants as actors (cf. Pott, Rass & Wolff 2018). This lack of acknowledging agency constitutes a general challenge in theorizing migration regimes (Rass & Wolff 2018). I follow Rass and Wolff’s suggestion of an ‘agency-based approach’ to overcome this. They regard the regime as a negotiation arena involving more and less powerful actors, including migrants. These negotiations re-create and shape the structures that make up the migration regime. Rass and Wolff distinguish actors’ practices on three levels: Primary practices cover direct mobility mainly on the individual level of migrants. Secondary practices control migration, mainly including the large spectrum of actions by institutionalized political and infrastructural actors. Finally, tertiary practices indirectly impact the first and second level, they for example include political changes in involved states, but also knowledge production on migration. By putting actors’ practices on these three levels in one relational context, we can detect power relations and asymmetries between them, reaching from migrants to state actors from the returning and 3 Leerkes and van Houte (2020) find (1) thin regimes – characterized by weak enforcement interests and limited enforcement capacities; (2) thick regimes – marked by strong enforcement interests and robust enforcement capacities; (3) targeted regimes – where strong enforcement capacities are applied selectively, often exempting certain migrant categories; and (4) hampered regimes – which have strong enforcement interests but face constraints due to limited enforcement capacities. Germany mainly exhibits characteristics of a targeted regime. It has relatively strong enforcement capacities that are applied selectively, often exempting certain migrant categories, for example with many rejected asylum seekers remaining in a status of toleration because of legal or practical obstacles (see also footnote 10). In contrast, the United Kingdom exemplifies a thick enforcement regime, marked by high deportation rates, a strong political commitment to return, and effective infrastructure, whereas Italy, shaped by both political ambivalence and logistical constraints, represents a thin regime. 4 I have not included such a more comprehensive embedding in the published papers, as this rather connects the findings of the various articles. I will pick up the theoretical considerations presented here in Sub-section 6.1, where I further link them to my empirical findings. 13 returnee-receiving states, as well as broader developments in the environment in which migration regimes evolve (cf. Pott, Rass & Wolff 2018, 50). To start out with, migrants have structuration power through their agency and co-shape the return regime by the way they act. Consciously or unconsciously, they make use of the rooms for manoeuvre they have within a given regime (Lipphardt & Schwarz 2018, 190). This action leverage is not entirely autonomous, but emerge and develop in relation to the historically embedded political, legal and social options which certain migrants have under particular conditions. They can conform or confront them, manifest or transform them. Thus, the leverages do not follow the norms, rules or values of all actors, as these are contested. This means that there is both dependency and contingency in how migrants create and use their agency. Martina Benz and Helen Schwenken describe this leverage as an active ‘wilfulness’ in decision-making ('Eigensinnigkeit’, Benz & Schwenken 2005). They situate migration-related decisions in response to the defined structural pathways, which lies on the primary level of practices identified by Rass and Wolff, and which can influence practices on the second level of migration control. In the case of the German-Gambian return regime, for example, German state actors had to keep adapting their assumptions and strategies continuously while observing over time that not many Gambians with a denied asylum claim would opt for a return through the promoted ‘Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration’ programmes. While the conceptual efforts by Anna Lipphardt and Inga Schwarz (2018) as well as Benz and Schwenken (2005) help to better understand migrant agency, they do however not offer further differentiations between agency that is inherent in migrant existence through their mere being and living under the given means – and by using their rooms for manoeuvre potentially already challenge existing rules – and agency created through actions that migrants do in order to widen their action leverages through a change of rules. Going beyond the rather unintended influences of such primary practices, I wanted to observe if and which more direct leverages of action migrants would create in order to claim and gain influence, through political positioning that would aim at changing the structure within which they socially exist as ‘(potential) returnees’. In order to understand better why and how migrants have or develop which kind of political agency within the regime, we need to look more closely in which different ways their agency can be linked to the regime. For this, the theoretical work of critical realist Margaret Archer on structuration is highly instructive (cf. Brock, Carrigan & Scambler 2016). Archer’s approach to the relationship of structure and agency gives a rich theoretical account of the inner mechanisms of this relationship, which “offer a more fruitful theoretical avenue to overcome the structure– agency impasse in migration research” (Bakewell 2010, 1702) than many other attempts to bridge this impasse. Archer presumes a dualistic existence of agents and social structures, in accordance with the previously described understanding of regimes as relational structures. Archer is mainly concerned with how structures – which, according to her, exist prior to individuals that act within them – change through agency that individuals develop in their structural environment. The actions of agents have (intended or unintended) consequences for the nature of the 20 economies. Their re-engagement in the domestic labour market involves utilizing these assets to create job opportunities and foster entrepreneurship (Kleist, 2015). But return migrants can also foster developments beyond the economic sector. Their contributions are then described as social and political remittances in the literature. Broadly, political remittances are part of social remittances, more precisely ideas, norms, practices, and identities that migrants transfer back to their home countries and potentially influence political and social structures (Levitt & Lamba-Nieves 2011). This also applies to returning migrants. Research has, for example, elaborated on political remittances transferred through migrant organisations (e.g. Piper 2009), the voting power of diaspora communities (e.g. Waterbury 2006) or so-called “grassroots transnationalism” affecting politics at the national level (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003). For returning migrants, Lisa Chauvet and Marion Mercier (2014) show significantly increased voter participation rates and electoral competitiveness in elections in Mali in areas with higher presence of returned migrants from Non-African countries. Catia Batista and Pedro Vicente similarly find that governance in destination countries matters. In a behavioural experiment in Cabo Verde, they show that international emigration positively affects the population’s demand for improved political accountability, with stronger effects for migrants to countries with better governance, and especially for returned migrants (Batista & Vicente 2011). Antonio Spilimbergo, using dynamic panel regressions on a global longitudinal dataset dating back to the 1950s, found that individuals who received tertiary education abroad promote democracy in their home countries, “but only if the foreign education is acquired in democratic countries” (Spilimbergo 2009, 528). The work of Christl Kessler and Stefan Rother (Kessler & Rother 2016) on political remittances through return migration for the case of the Philippines reveals some conditionalities to the positive effects. In line with Spilimbergo (2009), they find that the influence of political remittances varies depending on the migrants' destination country and the duration of their stay. Returnees from countries with well-established democratic systems are more likely to engage in political activities back home, such as voting, community organizing, or participating in local governance. They also assert that political remittances do not automatically lead to democratization. Factors such as the local political environment, existing power structures, and the willingness of return migrants to challenge these structures play a crucial role in shaping outcomes. In some cases, returnees may face resistance when attempting to introduce new political ideas or practices (Kessler & Rother 2016). This resonates with Debnath’s finding that beyond the question what assets and ambitions returning migrants bring back on an individual level, it is the structural conditions in the origin country that have to offer opportunities for their positive impact (Debnath 2016). In conclusion, while the relationship between return migration, political development, and democratization is often framed within optimistic narratives, it is essential to critically examine the complexities that underpin these dynamics. The conditionalities found in the empirical works on political remittances indicate that we cannot presume a positive effect of return migration on political development. What matters are contextual factors of the destination country as well as in the country into which migrants return, but also the conditions under which 21 migrants return (Cassarino 2004). My analyses reveal that remittances through return migration need to be understood in a more complex interplay: it is not only the returning migrants themselves that produce political remittances around the topic of return, but also the negotiation of return pressure by active migrants can create political remittances, as elaborated in paper 5.3. Furthermore, I found mixed results for the political activation of returned migrants who have to navigate the devastating post-return conditions of state-induced return, as further discussed in papers 5.1 and 5.2. This demands for a critical and differentiated look at role of return conditions created through the destination state’s return pressures, building on misleading political assumptions that positive development effects can be created through smart policy design for any migrant that destination countries want to see leaving. This demands a critical examination of knowledge creation about reintegration. The intrinsic link between reintegration and development is particularly strongly enforced in AVRR programmes, which I will further elaborate on in the following sub-section. 2.4 State-Induced Return: Between Development and Externalization of Border Control The interplay between research paradigms and the politics of return migration complicate the relationship between return and development. According to Hein de Haas (2010), we can observe a ‘paradigm pendulum’ in migration and development studies, in which shifts in scholarly interpretations of the migration-development-nexus have been intertwined with policy narratives and public perceptions of migration dynamics. De Haas argues that an academic emphasis on the potential benefits of return migration has led to generalized assumptions about returnees contributing positively to their home societies (de Haas 2010). When researchers find relationships between return and development, they do not necessarily focus on the significance of their individual return conditions. They might not draw clear distinctions between a transnational diaspora, temporarily returning and longer-term returned migrants (see, for example, Turner 2008). Or they might not focus on the role of skill level (see, for example, Hammond 2015). Furthermore, many of the studies that identify political remittances focus on regular migrants, with connotations on skill level and return decisionmaking (for important exceptions, see Ammassari 2004 and Lecadet 2018). Finding generalizations and regularities regarding the development impact of return migration is thus a challenge that researchers face due to the boundedness of their knowledge creation in political times and spaces. This complexity leaves a great scope of interpretation for policy makers. My work scrutinizes some of these generalizations, how they are politically envisioned versus if and how they unfold in reality. To give these of my findings some scholarly context, I will first sketch a brief history of how AVRR was established and incorporated in development cooperation (2.4.1), and then argue in line with critical scholars that the ambivalences this creates resonate with a biased scholarly engagement in studying assisted returns with a focus on reintegration. 22 2.4.1 AVRR: A Migration Management Tool in Development Cooperation First programmes to support return migration for development in the 1970s focused on migrants with relevant skills or resources and an interest in returning in order to combat negative impacts of brain drain. At the time, increases in the international migration of skilled workers had brought brain drain to the forefront as a severe challenge for the economies and societies in developing countries. In parallel, diasporas were increasingly recognized for their developmental potentials, contributing to a ‘brain regain’ through both rather short-term or more long-term return (de Haas 2010). However, with the rise of both immigration from developing countries to Europe and its problematisation, the political focus in the return-development nexus has been shifting (Cassarino 2019). It is increasingly translated into a language with which policymakers try to find answers towards how to deal with irregularised migrants in Europe. Already in Richard Black and Khalid Koser’s foundational study on the return-development nexus in post-conflict situations, they emphasize that returning is, in contrast to political hopes to a ‘natural’ durable solution to displacement, a highly problematic issue (Black & Koser 1999). One of the occurring complications is the blurriness of voluntariness between people who left as refugees and might have been waiting for stabilization in their origin country in order to go home, rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants. These groups are covered by the same AVRR programmes. In line with this, Tine Davids and Marieke van Houte (2014) reconstruct how, in post-conflict contexts in 2007/2008, there is a significant mismatch between the migrants that policy makers identify as potential post-return change agents and the actual target group of their return policies. While allocated skill and capital as well as an intrinsic return motivation are recognized as key factors in generating development potential, most return and reintegration measures target rejected asylum seekers – who typically lack these preconditions. Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) and Reintegration (AVRR) programmes as the central policy instruments that enforce the return-development linkage are initiated and funded by destination countries and facilitated by the IOM. 6 AVR is the “administrative, logistical or financial support, including reintegration assistance to migrants unable or unwilling to remain in the host country or country of transit and who decide to return to their country of origin” (IOM 2019, 12). Conceptually, AVRR support thus shall prepare and equip migrants for a successful postreturn reintegration, representing a precondition for a chance of their developmental contributions (Cassarino 2004). However, while AVR programmes were first introduced in the late 1970s to early 1980s, their initiation was not linked to the return-development policy strategies developed in the 1970s. AVRR was, instead, supposed to bypass the expensive and more complicated process of deportation of rejected asylum seekers, and allow migrants a more dignified return than through deportation. Thirdly, AVRR meant to be less dependent on cooperation of origin countries, for example in the formal identification of presumed nationals (Noll 1999; Schneider & Kreienbrink 2010) and additionally combine it with promising 6 Generally, the IOM implements AVRR programmes as contractors to the funding host states. Development cooperation in countries of origin offer supplementary services to which returned migrants are referred once back. 23 arguments for migrants and origin countries: AVRR promised, more than AVR, to be a ‘triplewin’ for returning states, origin countries and returning migrants alike (Sinatti 2015). With further policy shifts of the EU towards more restrictive immigration controls in response to rising asylum applications and migration flows during the 1980s and 1990s, AVRR programmes were significantly expanded (Lietaert, Broekaert & Derluyn 2017b). In the 2000s, AVRR programmes increasingly started emphasizing a developmental angle, linking return with sustainable reintegration in migrants' home countries (Koser 2001). Accordingly, various European countries consider their AVRR programmes as part of their approach in migration and development, and allocate development funds for this (Frankenhaeuser, Noack, Bacchi, Keijzer, Klavert & Knoll 2013). For example, Germany, where AVRR has first been introduced but for a long time not integrated in development cooperation, started following its return and reintegration strategy along a ‘coherent government approach’ involving the German Interior Ministry (BMI) and the Ministry of Development Cooperation (BMZ) in 2017. With this, the BMZ strategically “expanded the topic ‘return’ towards sustainable reintegration in the origin country” (BMZ 2019, 9). From the perspective of the IOM, the way Germany links return assistance with developmental strategies is a progressive step to make assisted return more effective, and design migration policy in a migrant-centred way (IOM 2019). This resonates with concepts of German development cooperation. The German development agency GIZ states that “instead of simply pushing countries of origin to readmit nationals and focusing on the number of returnees, development cooperation research and practice indicate that countries of origin and destination must cooperate closely in order to facilitate return and sustainable reintegration, and to enhance returnees’ potential to contribute to the development of their countries of origin” (Honerath & Haase 2016, emphasis by author). With this, the GIZ incorporates the narrative of a ‘triple win’ through return migration (Sinatti 2015) and further strengthens the notion of containment development (Landau 2019). The GIZ functions as an important implementer of Germany’s return programmes beyond the IOM (Gerloff 2018). Their engagement in the field is particularly useful as the GIZ can build on its humanitarian legitimacy, according trust among its partners in developing countries, and its established political networks and management infrastructures. Its interest-bound reorientation therefore strengthens European border externalization quite effectively (Gerloff 2018). The instrumentalisation of development aid thus externalizes political challenges from within the EU to third countries. This was also observed on a multilateral scale by, for example, Natascha Zaun and Olivia Nantermoz (Zaun & Nantermoz 2023) who show this in the establishment of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), in which numerous return and reintegration measures have also been established (see papers 5.1 and 5.2). Returning to the IOM, researchers have also assessed the problematic multifaceted role of the IOM as a key stakeholder in establishing AVRR since its beginnings. In the 2000s, it had increasingly engaged in research and projects towards establishing and reinforcing the migration-development nexus (Newman-Grigg 2020). Their efforts to embed reintegration into local and community development aligns with the „dialogue shift in development away from 24 prescriptive top-down approaches towards community-based development“ (Newman-Grigg 2020, 100). The IOM usually implements AVRR, and its local offices serve as important connection points after the return. Through its work in return and reintegration, the IOM “can be understood as a ‘developmental borderwork’ actor, whose practices are underpinned by a sincere but procedural humanitarianism, a technical focus on best practices and implementation, and an intervention approach drawn from the development industry” (Frowd 2018). Philippe Frowd’s analysis underlines how externalisation processes apply not only wording but also implementation techniques from the development cooperation industry. Through a successful or sustainable return supported by development-lent concepts and/or funds, migrants are expected not only to refrain from remigrating, but actually be enabled to contribute to local development. This leads me to a critical assessment of the concept of reintegration. 2.4.2 Debates over the Return-Development Nexus and ‘Reintegration’ in AVRR Although AVRR has not been designed as a development cooperation tool, its understandings of migrant return draw from conceptual frameworks that migration and development studies have produced, as described in the previous sub-section. These frameworks were shaped by broader theoretical paradigms, which gradually shifted the migration-development nexus from concern with brain drain to an emphasis on brain regain. However, clear, causal relationships between return and development have remained empirically elusive. Their effects are casespecific, multifaceted, and sometimes counterintuitive. Despite this, policy approaches tend to highlight the developmental potentials of return, often extrapolating optimistic outcomes from a rather small share of privileged returnees. These generalizations help legitimize politically motivated return efforts, particularly those aimed at externalizing border control. As a result, expert knowledge that may hold true only for specific returnee profiles and contexts is applied to broader migrant populations without regard for their structural disadvantages (Davids & van Houte 2014). Concretely, policy incentives to return mainly target rejected asylum seekers, most of which have faced multiple social disadvantages since before their migration and while in Germany, instead of attracting migrants which would potentially yield better brain regain results, for example based on skills. This sidesteps the socio-economic barriers that shape both their pre-migration and return conditions. The result is a misalignment between policy intentions and migrants’ lived realities. Political practice therefore may fulfil only part of what they claim to deliver: they may be able to successfully return migrants physically but do not account for their reintegration processes. In practice, therefore, AVRR often resembles deportation more than development-oriented return, despite its branding as ‘voluntary’. Both AVRR and deportation aim to reduce the number of ‘unwanted’ migrants and target individuals that are subject to deportability. Deportability entails structural disadvantages, such as barriers to qualification, resource accumulation, and psychological security, that constrain migrants’ autonomy well before they agree to return. As scholars have argued, AVRR decisions are often made under duress, within a context of limited options (Cleton & Chauvin 2020; Cleton & Schweitzer 2021; Crane & Lawson 2020; Kalir 2017; Leerkes, van Os & Boersema 2017; Lietaert, Broekaert & Derluyn 2017b). Scholars 25 such as Barak Kalir (2017) and Frances Webber (2011) emphasize that AVRR often reflects the absence of viable alternatives rather than a free choice (see also Cassarino 2020; Erdal & Oeppen 2018). Accordingly, various scholars argue for conceptualizing AVRR and deportation as points on the same continuum, including in terminology. Two important suggestions have been proposed: ‘state-induced return’ (Koch 2014; Maâ 2021) as an overarching term underlines the simultaneous role of state interests and streamlined practices of international organizations such as the IOM’s, while ‘soft deportation’ (Kalir 2017; Leerkes, van Os & Boersema 2017) emphasizes AVRR’s coercive underpinnings and replaces its voluntary label. While these critiques sharpen our understandings of AVRR’s conceptual ambiguity, they primarily focus on return decisions and the period leading up to departure. However, it is the post-return phase, often out of sight of policy actors in the return-inducing countries, that serves as a central stage to legitimize AVRR. This is what the term ‘reintegration’ in the programme’s title signals. Unlike deportation, AVRR claims to support the well-being of returnees and their potential contribution to the development in their country of origin/return. Yet, the post-return experience is unevenly studied across contexts and often glossed over in policy frameworks. Thus, the critical work being an important contribution, this constitutes an important conceptual gap to which my work directly speaks. Notably, a growing body of studies have examined life after AVRR and deportation. These include work on AVRR by Davids and van Houte (2014), Leander Kandilige and Geraldine Adiku (2020), Nauja Kleist (2020), Ine Lietaert, Erik Broekaert and Ilse Derluyn (Lietaert 2021; Lietaert, Broekaert & Derluyn 2017a), Sandra Sacchetti (2016) or Masja van Meeteren, Godfried Engbersen, Erik Snel and Marije Faber (2014). Regarding deportation, Shahram Khosravi (2018a; 2018b) as well as Liza Schuster and Nassim Majidi (2013; 2015) have given prominent scholarly accounts, as have Agnieszka Radziwinowiczówna (2021; 2022), Susanne Schultz (2022) or Evin Rodkey (2016), to name but a few. Their findings have informed the analyses in papers 5.2 and 5.5. Two points about this strand of literature are worth highlighting on this more general level of discussion. First, while these studies highlight the importance of return voluntariness and the limited impact of reintegration assistance, they do not systematically compare AVRR and deportation. Some distinguish between the two but do not carve out their similarities or differences (e.g. Davids & van Houte, 2014; Lietaert & Kuschminder, 2021; Ruben, Davids & van Houte 2009). Others either presuppose their difference by sampling only one of the two, (see, for example, Lietaert, Derluyn & Broekaert 2014) or treat them with an indifference by including both in one sample (see, for example, Åkesson 2011). Second, these studies do not focus on reintegration as an analytical concept. Instead, they employ various alternative frameworks to study post-return conditions. My analysis in paper 5.3 speaks to these shortcomings along empirical material on post-return trajectories. The literature on reintegration, on the other hand, has expanded as a relatively new strand of discussion, but became the dominant framework in post-return research over the past decade (Kuschminder 2017a; Marino & Lietaert 2022). This focus on reintegration grew partly in response to policy demands for more systematic post-return research and to make it analytically 26 more valuable and applicable (Black et al. 2004; Koser & Kuschminder 2015; Paasche 2014). Due to this closeness to policy, it is important to reflect which consequences this has for all actors in the return regime. The reintegration concept remains a contested one, because of its proximity to policy goals and its conceptual ambiguities (Marino & Lietaert 2022). Some scholars have systematized it, developing parameters to measure reintegration outcomes; others have critically assessed its normative and political implications. I will explicate this by giving some brief insights into the questions, challenges and solutions that the development of the concept brings along, in order to substantiate my critical stance. One central tension lies in the concept’s connection to ‘return sustainability’ (Lietaert & Kuschminder 2021), which involves elaborating what a ‘successful return’ is and how these two relate (Kuschminder 2017b). One debated conceptual strand of questions considers the role of re-emigration – whether returned migrants should (not) aspire to or be capable of reemigrating or whether they want to or can sustain transnational livelihoods (Carling & Erdal 2014; Kuschminder 2017a; Lietaert & Kuschminder 2021). The centrality of these questions mirrors why the definition of reintegration itself is so contested. It stands in direct relation to the development-oriented question whether not re-emigrating is a success in fighting “root causes of migration” or rather leads to involuntary immobility. Typologies addressing ‘successful return’ and ‘sustainable reintegration’ usually consider three dimensions: (1) migrants’ individual characteristics including social and biographical factors, (2) their conditions in host countries including the reasons for returning, and (3) the contexts into which they return. Most highlight challenges with AVRR and emphasize that the success of return is more closely tied to voluntariness than to the assistance offered. Central works that engage with reintegration and return sustainability after AVR(R) systematically include those of Black et al. (2004), Koser and Kuschminder (2015) as well as Arne Strand, Synnøve Kristine Nepstad Bendixsen, Hilde Lidén, Erlend Paasche, and Lovise Aalen (2016). Yet, they cannot entirely withdraw from the ultimate goal of a sustainable return that enables migrants, in the best case, to decide to migrate through regular means – which in most cases lies far outside the scope of reintegration processes. Building on debates around successful return, Kuschminder (2017b) developed a reintegration framework based on empirical data from female returnees to Ethiopia. Her work expands the concept to include highly privileged to least-privileged returnees and their conditions, including deportees. Overall, she frames reintegration as a ‘strategic’ process enacted between migrants and the societies into which they return, thus as a ‘bidirectional responsibility’ (Kuschminder 2017a). This strategy depends on returned migrants’ relationship to – and the structural openness of – key sectors (government, civil society, private sector) in the country of origin/return. In her perspective, even though the pre-return conditions make a central difference to the post-return experiences, Northern policy does not carry a responsibility in the reintegration process. In parallel, the Think Tank Samuel Hall and IOM advanced an ‘integrated approach to reintegration’ (Samuel Hall & IOM 2017) as a tool to statistically measure and quantitatively monitor reintegration empirically on a large and comparative scale. Their framework, which 27 can be understood as a foundational tool in reintegration management, introduces multi-level indicators spanning individual, communal, and structural domains. Although recognizing the role of pre-return conditions as contextually important factors, they do not systematically include or measure them in their comprehensive indicator system. Their findings suggest that challenges often lie at the meso-level of the community rather than individual or national level, implying that reintegration assistance requires interventions in public service domains, such as education, health, psychosocial assistance, access to employment and housing, not only for the returning migrants but for the communities of return (Samuel Hall & IOM 2017). As exemplified around these prominent frameworks, reintegration research frameworks tend to focus on whether individual migrants can re-establish themselves socially and economically and identify areas of policy intervention where they see the greatest obstacles within the identified framework. They can thus assess whether assistance can offset the disadvantages of semi-voluntary return, critically examine the positive claims of AVRR and make suggestions how to better fulfil them. They cannot, however, measure the broader political economy of return management. This conceptual direction aligns with a broader turn in development thinking, where neoliberal paradigms replaced earlier dependency-oriented models, casting migrants not as victims of underdevelopment but as agents of change if just equipped with the right tools (de Haas 2010; Faist 2008; Skeldon 2008). This is where Zana Vathi, Russell King and Barak Kalir (2022) see a central problem in the reintegration concept. They argue that, just as return practices, the study of reintegration takes place within geopolitical hierarchies that skew its framing toward the interests of destination states. For them, return sustainability is “a concept testifying to the unequal geopolitics of return” (Vathi, King & Kalir 2022, 6). While acknowledging that the reintegration concept has successfully incorporated findings from research on transnationalism, social networks and psychosocial well-being to the advantages of a seemingly caring humanitarian analytical lens, “the geopolitical aspects of reintegration are somewhat overlooked in return migration scholarship” (Vathi, King & Kalir 2022, 6). Rossella Marino and Ine Lietaert (2022) further trace how ‘sustainable reintegration’ became institutionalized through cycles of “normalisation, fragmentation, assimilation and renormalisation” (Marino & Lietaert 2022, 178), often led by the IOM. The IOM acts not just as an implementer but as a knowledge broker, “cooperating directly with consultants and academics or re-employing the latter’s independent re-definitions and views” (Marino & Lietaert 2022, 178). This shapes academic and policy understandings of reintegration in ways that support migration management. This leads to the final insight of this sub-section: reintegration is increasingly framed as a technical problem to be solved through management, rather than a political process shaped by asymmetrical power. When reintegration fails, the cause is often frames as managerial weakness – not the deeper political or economic constraints that structure return. In doing so, reintegration discourse depoliticizes the development-return nexus and obscures the gap between policy promises and migrants’ post-return realities. 28 To sum up, the analytical rise of reintegration reflects both shifting agendas and broader policy trends within the migration-development nexus. Despite the claim of creating a triple-win scenario in migrant return (Sinatti 2015), understandings of what ‘successful’ return and reintegration mean is contested between host states, origin states and returning migrants (Black & Gent 2006; Kuschminder 2017c), and tends to a bias towards interests of returning states (e.g. Black & Koser 1999; Collyer 2012; Lietaert, Derluyn & Broekaert 2014; Sinatti 2015). While often framed as a neutral tool to support humane return, the concept of reintegration is pervaded by power asymmetries on various levels which it obscures. The emphasis on measurable, comparable indicators and programmatic management depoliticizes return. It shifts attention away from structural barriers and geopolitical inequalities along the whole migration cycle that influences return and post-return. It instead emphasizes management tool effectiveness and migrant compliance. My work addresses the raised criticism in two ways. As a concrete consequence, I deliberately avoid relying on the reintegration concept, even when analysing post-return experiences at the individual level, as I do prominently in paper 5.2. Instead, I examine migrant agency within the same post-return setting as reintegration could be observed. On a more abstract level, my regime perspective enables insights into the asymmetric geopolitical power relations described by Vathi, King and Kalir (2022), particularly by revealing how these asymmetries are reconfirmed or contested by migrants and actors in the country of origin/return. This brings me to the next body of research to which my work speaks and responds to, which is the role of the origin country in the return regime. 2.5 The Origin Country in the Return Regime While the literature acknowledges that the political context at the receiving end of return plays an important role, only few works concentrate at this dimension in more detail. I have already touched upon literature that relates to potential interests of origin/return countries’ governments in Sub-section 2.3 regarding development hopes. However, as I have laid out, state-induced return represents a specific form of return for which the development-linkage must be questioned when considered from the perspective of origin/return states. That said, governments of destination and origin/return countries can find development rhetoric in this context as common grounds. Giulia Sinatti rightly pointed out that the understandings of return of Senegalese state actors build on development hopes and thus align with return ideals nourished by AVRR conceptualizations, even though they are likely to remain unfulfilled, and therefore do not align with perceptions of the returning individuals (Sinatti 2015). Similarly, Pécoud describes how origin/return country governments mitigate negative public perception by delegating the responsibility to manage return and reintegration to international organizations such as the IOM. This transfer of responsibility to non-state actors depoliticizes the return question and upcoming practical challenges, while aligning with destination states‘ interests and therefore allowing origin/return country governments to maintain legitimacy both domestically and internationally (Geiger & Pécoud 2010). Also, through cooperation in migration politics, European destination countries integrate their containment priorities in political strategies and management in West African countries of origin/return (see, for example 29 Bisong 2020 for Mali and Niger, and Roos, Trauner & Adam 2024 for Ghana and Senegal). Rossella Marino, Joris Schapendonk and Ine Lietaert (2023) describe for the case of The Gambia how even local civil society organizations are incorporated in return and reintegration management by destination states‘ return regimes. These studies are a record of destination state actors successfully aligning actors in countries of origin/return – mainly governmental but partly even also civil society – into their return management. While they of course consider the political context in the country of origin/return in their analysis, they mostly do not focus on how origin/return state actors assess and navigate the return demands of destination state actors, despite return enforcement being arguably the most contested field in migration cooperation. While strategies of responsibility avoidance or managerial cooperation might make up an important part of origin/return countries’ political strategies, we know little about how they negotiate their positions and deal with contestations among different origin/return stakeholders. When it comes to deportations, even less scholarly attention is paid to the political reactions at the receiving end. While there exist long-standing generalizing observations that origin/return countries are, somehow naturally, rather reluctant to accept deportees, and that therefore deporting countries therefore set conditionalities between readmission cooperation and financial aid to these countries (Noll 1999), there exists scarce differentiating knowledge about how countries of origin/return deal with such deportation demands. Statistics on actual deportation numbers highlight that despite the long-standing European efforts to increase return rates, these remain rather low despite a growing informalisation of readmission agreements (Cassarino 2007; Stutz & Trauner 2022). Considering the geopolitical imbalance and the informal spaces that these platforms create between the involved states, the relative ‘failure’ to expand deportation numbers also is a consequence of how governments in countries of origin/return handle the return question on a diplomatic as well as administrative level. Thus we need to learn more about them. As one important exception, Franzisca Zanker has compared how West African states handle deportation demands of European countries. Her findings show that there can exist different forms of cooperation, reaching from reluctant compliance to various forms of incompliances. She thus concludes that “countries are resisting [enforced] return, albeit in subtle ways given their asymmetric bargaining position” (Zanker 2023, 1). This indicates that in the case of deportations, origin/return country governments might develop different cooperation strategies and diplomatic positions. One of the countries she assessed was The Gambia, based on data I collected as part of her research team and which represented the most proactive resistance case. As part of this body of work, I contributed to a policy brief based on our comparative findings (cf. Zanker, Altrogge, Arhin-Sam & Jegen 2019). When destination countries return migrants through AVRR or deportation, countries of origin/return always have to show some degree of cooperation – reaching from identification of citizens before deportation, issuing landing permits to charter deportation flights, reception infrastructures at the airports to the establishment of a reintegration infrastructure among domestic of international actors. These contain some more passive and some more active 36 the time of the transatlantic slave trade, the Senegambia region was a major slave trade hub, bringing both African and European settlers, slave traders and slaves to the area. Internal, regional and international migration continued until the beginning of the 20th century based on slave trade as well as ethnic and religious conflicts. During colonial times, human workforce was moved between different colonies, with The Gambia receiving farmers as seasonal crossborder migrant workers that enabled the colonial cash crop production. (Sallah 2012, Teye 2022) Thus, The Gambia has long functioned as a hub of immigration, transit and emigration within its wider West African context and continues to do so despite state borders. (Saine, Ceesay & Sall 2013, xvi). In fact, it had been a net immigration country for a long time, with many regional migrants, especially from Senegal, living in The Gambia (Devillard, Bacchi & Noack 2015), making up 17% of its population in 2010 (Kebbeh 2013) 9 . But also “Gambians themselves have extended lineages in a web of connections spread over a large part of West Africa” (Saine, Ceesay & Sall 2013, xvi). Their regional interlinkages are also embedded in ethnic structures that continue to shape social, economic and migratory practices. Ethnic groups are not confined by national borders but are spread across the Senegambia region and beyond, maintaining transnational kinship, religious and linguistic ties. For instance, the Mandinka and Fula communities have strong cross-border networks with relatives in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, facilitating circular migration, marriage ties, and informal trade. Until the 1970s, the majority of Gambian emigration was directed toward neighbouring Senegal, with complemented by educational migration to other Commonwealth countries in the region with established universities, such as Sierra Leone. In addition, some Gambians sought economic opportunities elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, including in resource-rich areas such as the mining regions of Angola (Hultin et al. 2017). These movements were shaped by longstanding regional ties, as well as by colonial-era connections and educational pathways that facilitated accesses to certain Commonwealth destinations. Later on, regional mobility was further institutionalized through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which, beginning in the 1980s, progressively implemented protocols granting citizens of member states the right to visa-free entry, residence, and establishment across the region (Adepoju 2003). While regional migration remained dominant well to the post-independence decades, the late 20th century also witnessed the gradual expansion of Gambian mobility beyond West Africa. Building on existing cross-border networks just as other post-colonial West African states, new intercontinental networks bag to emerge in The Gambia through the development of a coastal tourism sector, which led to an increasing presence of Europeans in the country as early as the 1960s (Bellagamba, Ceesay & Vitturini 2021). Over the decades, the presence of European tourists strengthened ties across continents on individual levels and the pull of Western countries, encouraging Euro-African businesses, friendships, and families. Inter-continental migration then gained traction in the 1980s. 9 According to World Bank estimates, in 2010, only 64,905 (according to UN DESA: 77,440) Gambians lived abroad, while 290,104 immigrants lived in The Gambia (Devillard, Bacchi & Noack 2015). 37 Throughout the 2000s, when political repression under Jammeh intensified, also opportunities for social and economic advancement became increasingly tied to support for Jammeh’s regime. In response, migration emerged as a key avenue for young people seeking selfrealization and socio-economic empowerment, challenging the authority of political elites, elders, and family heads (Bellagamba, Ceesay & Vitturini 2021). As this happened while immigration policies in Europe and the USA grew more restrictive, more and more Gambian migrants opted for irregular entry into the EU, first via boat to the Canary Islands in the early 2000s, later via land routes across the Sahara and through the Mediterranean Sea. In The Gambia, this phenomenon became known by the local term ‘backway migration’, indicating aspiring migrants’ dependency on “illegal (otherwise referred to as irregular or clandestine) activities and on human smugglers, since the official (or legal) ways to reach Europe are limited and difficult to gain access to” (Conrad Suso 2019, 111). In the 2010s, Gambian emigration numbers accelerated significantly. Between 2015 and 2017, the small Gambian population ranked among the top 10-arriving nationalities at the borders of Spain and Italy (IOM 2018). In total, more than 45,000 Gambians were registered at the EU borders by Frontex as arriving by irregular means between 2010 and 2018 (Frontex 2021). This amounts to over 2% of the country’s population. By 2020, an estimated 139,210 Gambians were living abroad (United Nations Population Division Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UN DESA] 2020), representing approximately 6% of the national population. 3.1.1 Western Destinations After independence, the former colonial power Great Britain as well as the USA, as well as Spain and some of the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, had become popular destinations for Gambians. Thus, most Gambians leaving the country chose intercontinental destinations rather than remaining in the region. The attractiveness of inter-continental migration has increased across West African countries with higher accessibility of transnational imaginaries in a globalized and postcolonial setting (Kleist & Thorsen 2017; Vigh 2009). These imaginaries are associated with success and modernity, contrasting sharply with national contexts characterized by a felt absence of possibilities, which is predominant in Sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly also in The Gambia under Jammeh’s dictatorship. ,, 5 000 10 000 15 000 20 000 25 000 30 000 35 000 40 000 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 United States of America Italy Spain Germany United Kingdom Figure 1: Gambian migration stocks in selected Western countries 1990-2020. Source: UN DESA (2020) 38 As Figure 1 presents, by 2020, four of the five top host countries for Gambian migrants were in Europe. There were an estimated 23,086 Gambians living in Italy and 17,200 in Germany, both representing the fastest-growing Gambian communities in the 2010s. In comparison, in its former colonizing state Great Britain, UN DESA estimated only around 10,015 Gambians in 2020 (although other estimates go up to 36,000 Gambia-born migrants, based on different statistical counting procedures in the UK (Migration and Sustainable Development in The Gambia Project 2020). In Spain, the community had been growing since the 2000s, and then rather stagnated in size during the 2010s. The other notable Gambian migration is to the US, with around 34,000 Gambians residing there in 2020. A steadier flow over the years indicates more regular immigration such as though family reunification, student mobility and other visa. 3.1.2 Reasons to leave For most Gambians leaving the country, their economic situation and the connected strive for upward social mobility for oneself and the family are part of their motivation to migrate. For young Gambians, particularly young men, economic advancement, including the wellestablished option of seeking chances elsewhere, is part of a rite of passage into adulthood (Conrad Suso 2020; Gaibazzi 2015). Opportunities to do so in The Gambia are regarded as too limited to do so by many, especially among the younger, which reflects their low labour force participation rate (GBOS 2023). Migration is a “powerful trope for imagining oneself as being socially on the move … and a way of imagining a possible escape from a frozen future” (Gaibazzi 2014, 173). Often, among those who want to go, there is a belief of predestination to migration, outshining some of the severe risks attached to ‘backway’ migration (Cham 2024). The normalcy in leaving for social advancement is also encapsulated in the desperation and sense of stuckedness among those who do not see an opportunity to travel, developing the “nerves syndrome” (Conrad Suso 2022). This normalcy of physical mobility for upward socio-economic mobility also accounts for Gambians who migrate to study abroad. Although the share of Gambians who follow tertiary education is very limited, chances for them to spend time at a foreign university and then also potentially remain abroad for better job opportunities is high, as options for tertiary-level education in the small country are rather new. The only university in the country, the University of The Gambia (UTG), was established only in 1999 and still offers a relatively limited range of degree programmes, particularly at the postgraduate level. While UTG plays a crucial role I expanding access to higher education nationally, its institutional capacity and academic infrastructure remain under development, which can pose challenges for international recognition and for students seeking advanced or specialized qualifications (Bellagamba, Ceesay & Vitturini 2021). While formerly, also some Commonwealth countries in West Africa were popular destinations for studies, nowadays most educational mobility from The Gambia takes place to the United Kingdom and the USA. In contrast, backway migration tends to include more low-educated individuals. For example, in 2005, a study found the illiteracy shares of Senegalese and Gambian migrants in Spain well beyond 70 percent (see also Gaibazzi 2015; Kaplan Marcusán 2005). Other studies also indicate a rather high share of lower education levels than secondary level among Gambians travelling towards or arriving in Europe (Altrogge 2019). 39 3.1.3 Gambian Migrants’ Legal Status in Europe Many Gambian migrants in Europe hold temporary residence permits or no legal residence permit, especially in Italy and Germany, where also the communities grew particularly quickly in the 2010s. Table 2 shows the limited amount of regular residence permits among Gambian nationals registered in the EU. It indicates the large discrepancy of regularized versus residence permits with only limited or temporal regularization 10 among the Gambian population in 2018 in the three countries with the largest Gambian population in continental Europe. As can be seen, there are some slight variations, for example Germany granting some more visas based on family reasons, while Spain granting more visas based on employment reasons and Italy giving more Gambians refugee protection than the other two. However, in all three countries, the vast majority of registered Gambians carried precarious legal statuses, including subsidiary protection, pending asylum decisions, and rejected asylum statuses. As an indication, in 2017, 12,400 Gambians filed an asylum claim in the European Union (see Table 3). At the same time, overall 6,540 Gambians in the EU had been ordered to leave due to lack in residence permit, with the highest shares in Germany and Spain (see Table 4). Valid residence permits for 12 months or longer on 31 December 201811 Reporting country Registered Gambian population 1 January 2019 which have the following residence titles: Family reasons Education reasons Employment reasons Refugee status Italy 22,075 667 33 676 1,183 Spain 19,257 6,592 8 1,244 14 Germany 14,552 2,412 34 25 418 Table 2: Valid residence permits for 12 months or longer on 31 December 2018 Source: EUROSTAT tables “Registered population by citizenship” [migr_pop1ctz] and “Valid residence permits” [migr_resvalid] 10 The Duldung (“toleration”) is a temporary suspension of deportation granted under German immigration law (§ 60a AufenthG) to individuals who are legally obliged to leave the country but cannot be deported for practical or legal reasons — for example, due to missing travel documents, medical conditions, or ongoing education or training. It is not a residence permit, and while it prevents immediate removal, it confers only minimal rights and creates a highly precarious legal status. Individuals with a toleration status remain legally obligated to leave Germany and may face deportation once the suspending circumstances no longer apply. Despite this, many individuals remain in toleration status for extended periods, creating a condition of legal uncertainty and limited access to integration pathways (Altrogge & Auer 2020; Cleton & Schweitzer 2021). 11 These statistics are to be understood as indicative rather than precise representations of migrant populations, as inconsistencies in reporting standards between national and European registries persist – including for Gambian nationals in Germany. Moreover, countries differ in how they classify certain residence categories, particularly those linked to asylum procedures. The residence categories presented here therefore reflect a selection of statuses that are relatively comparable across countries, rather than an exhaustive list. 40 First-time Gambian asylum applicants by EU country (overall top shares) Reporting country 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 European Union (incl. UK) 11,030 11,925 15,510 12,400 4,355 3,270 2,105 Italy 8,490 7,970 8,845 8,705 1,660 140 125 Germany 1,910 2,995 5,655 2,620 1,380 880 645 Spain 30 55 70 265 125 175 245 Table 3: First-time Gambian asylum applicants by EU Country (overall top shares) Source: EUROSTAT table „Asylum applicants by type, citizenship, age and sex - annual aggregated data“ [migr_asyappctza] Gambian nationals in the EU ordered to leave based on lacking residence permit Reporting country 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 European Union (incl. UK) 1,525 1,720 2,355 6,345 5,770 3,690 2,740 Italy 270 400 495 490 540 860 615 Germany 230 255 260 2,740 1,750 925 750 Spain 330 405 990 2,335 2,570 740 555 Table 4: Gambian nationals in the EU ordered to leave based on lacking residence permit Source: EUROSTAT table “Third country nationals ordered to leave – annual data (rounded)” [migr_eiord] In Germany, of 15,725 Gambians registered at the national central register of foreign nationals (“Ausländerzentralregister”) on 31 December 2018, more than two thirds (10,915) were legally registered as ‘seeking protection’ (“Schutzsuchende”) (Statistisches Bundesamt [Destatis] 2019). This value had increased by 284% between 2014 and 2016, which was the second highest increase among foreign nationals seeking protection in Germany after Syria (Destatis 2017). In 2016, 89 percent of these asylum decisions were still pending, which dropped to 60 percent until 2018. During that time, the number of Gambians in Germany with a rejected asylum status increased from 860 in 2016 to 3,510 in 2018. This number kept increasing as asylum processing sped up, around the same time as the Gambian dictatorship ended and the new government established. By 2020, there were 6,105 Gambians in Germany with a rejected asylum claim. Most of them, 5,720, held the toleration status, others were obliged to leave the country immediately (Destatis 2023). 3.2 Return to The Gambia The statistics presented in the previous sub-section indicate that according to German law, a majority of Gambians residing there in the mid-2010s were supposed to leave the country. In the following, I present how Germany operationalizes this policy orientation, including statistical background as well as how return as a political topic and administrative process emerged between the two countries. Subsequently, I explain how return is perceived in Gambian society and how this perception weighs different types of return differently. I also explain how these selective perceptions relate to the return-development-nexus. For this, I draw 41 on empirical insights I gained during my research, but which I have not previously published in this analytical framing. 3.2.1 State-Induced Returns from Germany to The Gambia The increased amount of rejected asylum cases coincided with the governmental change and the Gambian government establishing and managing a ‘democracy in transition’. For German authorities, the de facto abolition of Jammeh’s authoritarian regime legitimized the rejection of protection status. The number of deportations from Germany back to The Gambia started to increase after the governmental change, and the German administration also started deportations of larger groups of individuals via chartered airplanes (see Figure 2 and Figure 3). The increase of deportations to The Gambia, especially those executed through charter flights was preceded by intense negotiations between the EU and the Gambian government of how forced return to The Gambia could be implemented and raised. These negotiations became increasingly politically contested in The Gambia, which is the departure point of articles 5.3 and 5.4. In addition, Gambian asylum seekers are part of the target group of Germany’s ‘Assisted Voluntary Return’ programmes REAG-GARP and the additional “StarthilfePlus” component. In this context, German authorities have developed cross-departmental efforts to increase the return rates among Gambians, combining migration governance with developmental logic (Altrogge & Zanker 2019; Gerloff 2018). Beyond general outreach, policy makers began proactively targeting Gambian asylum seekers through tailored initiatives. These measures include ‘return preparation programmes’ (“Rückkehrvorbereitende Maßnahmen”), which offer prereturn vocational or business training designed to facilitate economic reintegration after return. While these are not limited Gambians, various policy processes reveal that the Gambian community was addressed with particular emphasis. This selective approach to return enforcement aligns with what Leerkes and van Houte (2020) describe as a targeted enforcement regime, characterized by strong enforcement capacity combined with selective political will. In such regimes, return efforts increasingly focus on groups whose deportability increases, as was the case for Gambians following the governmental change. With political obstacles seemingly 3 8 310 4 13 0 5 10 15 20 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 Figure 3: Deportations Germany – The Gambia Source: Deutscher Bundestag 2016-2023b Figure 2: Deportation charters Germany – The Gambia Source: Deutscher Bundestag 2018-2023b 42 reduced, they became a more ‘returnable’ group and were thus made an operational priority despite their relatively small numbers. 12 For example, in 2017, one district in South Western Germany with a significant Gambian asylum seeker population launched a special “future workshop” specifically targeting Gambian participants. The programme aimed to inform them about the option of voluntary return while providing vocational skills training in areas such as metal and wood processing or the hotel industry. The initiative emerged from local actor’s recognition of a critical gap in sensitization for post-return opportunities – a gap they sought to address, despite reintegration lying beyond their formal, domestic mandate. That same year, a ‘Gambia task force’ was established at the federal state level in BadenWürttemberg. It brought together a broad array of political and administrative actors, including representatives from the German Interior Ministry, the German Development Ministry, the IOM, development agencies, federal state agencies involved in return administration, and domestic training institutions. The task force aimed to align return-related efforts with development policy, under the overarching goal of facilitating more returns to The Gambia. One of its projects envisioned a returnee training pathway that would begin in Germany and continue at a Gambian vocational institute supported by German development cooperation. The training focused on fields considered relevant in the development context of The Gambia, such as solar installation, welding, and agricultural machinery. Although the project was ultimately not implemented in the way initially designed – partly because of the lack in interested participants in Germany – it illustrates how return and development were increasingly conceptualized in an integrated manner by policy and administration. It was hoped that synergies could be created under the precondition that the targeted Gambians would have to leave Germany by all means. With these dynamics, Gambian asylum seekers in Germany felt an increased pressure to return voluntarily so as not to risk deportation. I reflect on the creation and consequences of these pressures in a policy brief (Altrogge & Auer 2020) and in article 5.3. However, notably, AVRR to The Gambia remained relatively low in numbers, even in comparison to deportations. Overall, there were 183 AVRR returns between 2017 and 2020 from Germany to The Gambia. Table 6 indicates that AVRR was frequented slightly more after the change in government in The Gambia and with rising pressure to return, but on a rather low level. Unfortunately, no adequate international statistics are available on assisted returns. However, AVRR participation rates from Germany give some indication, as Germany realizes most AVRR returns in EU comparison (see Table 5). 12 The following account is based on empirical observations and informal exchanges with policymakers and practitioners during my fieldwork in Germany. These interactions were not recorded or formally cited, and the description remains anonymized accordingly. 43 REAG-GARP participation Germany – The Gambia 2015 5 2016 12 2017 44 2018 54 2019 52 2020 33 2021 43 2022 29 Host countries for assisted returns, 2013 – 2023 accumulated Germany 202,937 Greece 52,129 Belgium 32,261 Austria 28,817 Netherlands 25,611 Rest of EU countries + Switzerland 50,063 Table 5: Host countries for assisted returns, 2013 – 2023 accumulated Source: IOM 2024 Table 6: REAG-GARP participation Germany – The Gambia Source: IOM bilateral communication 3.2.2 Perceptions of Return in The Gambia and the Country’s Development Agenda As my PhD project focuses on the impacts of state-induced return on the society in the country of origin/return, it is important to situate these returns in the broader landscape of return dynamics present in the country. Understanding how state-induced return relates to other forms of return is essential, as public perceptions of return shape how political actors frame the issue and justify their positions to the population. As stated before, in The Gambia, the topic of migration is narrowly tied to various developmentrelated issues, and its interlinkages are likewise framed and contested in political and civil society debates. When Barrow and his transition government came into office, both development and migrant return were established as important issues in national politics, which means that their relationships were also to be redefined. Regarding development, the Barrow government took over an impoverished country with empty state treasuries. Barrow and his fellow coalition partners promised to lead the country out of some of the miseries that the former dictatorship had guided it into. The surprising win of the transition government was possible because of a population that dared to seek change. Barrow’s coalition had promised to initiate this change, and expectations were high in the population for political and economic advancement, even though not yet closer defined. The steps that the government developed were presented in the National Development Plan (NDP). In article 5.1, I show in more detail how the NDP frames the role of development in relation to migration. In the following, I will go more into detail about how migrant return has developed and is understood in Gambian society, with a focus on contemporarily relevant types of return. I will also point out some of their linkages to development considerations and development cooperation in the country. With this, I support my argument that the parallel intensification of the two agendas of return and development and their ensued intertwining is linked to a diverse mix of interests, including the Gambian government’s development-oriented framing, but also 44 how the EU understands this development-migration nexus and European countries’ interests in returning asylum seekers. To a lower degree, interests of migrants themselves are also represented in the dynamics. Intercontinental return to The Gambia started after the increased intercontinental migrations, mainly to the UK and the US, in the 1970s. During the 1980’s, “the social figure of the ‘semester’, who spends a part of the year in Europe and comes back during the holidays, often accompanied by his wife and children, became popular in the coastal localities” (Bellagamba, Ceesay & Vitturini 2021, 7). This created an ideal picture of return embedded in transnational livelihoods leading to social and economic advancement. Semesters continued to return to the country and nourish this ideal and understanding of successful migration and return since that time. With increasing irregular migration, also non-voluntary returns started. In fact, European countries also deported Gambians during Jammeh’s time in power, partly even in similar amounts than post-Jammeh, as Cham and Adam show. “Media reporting on these returns, however, was non-existent” (Cham & Adam 2023a, 643). There was overall little media coverage on migration and (non)cooperation on returns, while Jammeh publically explained that he would not cooperate with the EU on deportations, drawing on arguments of neo-colonial resistance and African identity (Cham and Adam 2023b). Thus, even though deportations took place, they stayed invisible and were framed as an outcome of colonial dominance. When the post-Jammeh government took office, The Gambia experienced an unprecedented rise in return migration, particularly from Northern African countries. This sudden surge, far exceeding previous levels, was driven by a range of overlapping but distinct dynamics, including the aftermath of the Libyan civil war and the implementation of international humanitarian migrant return programmes. These dynamics, rather independent of Gambian domestic politics, were accompanied by the new government’s hopes that highly-skilled migrants would be returning to support the country’s economic and political recovery. Soon after, the growing pressure from the EU to accept rejected asylum seekers further intensified the complexity of return. The convergence of these different types of return shaped how EUdriven returns were politicized in public discourse and the media. The following provides a brief overview of these different types of return and the contexts in which they emerged. Return from Northern African transit countries In February 2017, the number of migrants returning to The Gambia started increasing drastically with ‘humanitarian’ returns from Northern African countries, especially Libyan countries. As a reaction towards the security crisis in North Africa in the context of the Libyan civil war, the EU set up a fast-paced rescue project, the ‘EU-IOM Joint Initiative for Migrant Protection and Reintegration’. Through this, the IOM transported thousands of migrants back to their countries of origin in ‘repatriation flights’. This type of return of migrants from the backway, of which many had not reached their probable destination, created by far the highest return numbers to The Gambia at the time, and actually probably within history of the country. Between January 2017 and January 2020, the IOM had 45 returned 5,000 migrants (IOM 2020), with around half of them being returned in 2017 alone (Altrogge & Zanker 2019). The regional programme had been launched in December 2016 just before the governmental change in The Gambia and thus, the following high-paced return coincided with the governmental change. Not only did return numbers escalate rapidly, but their management within The Gambia also became a politically sensitive issue, as explored in paper 5.1. While returning migrants were in principle eligible for reintegration support from the IOM, gaps in implementation left some excluded, prompting them to organize collectively and demand recognition from the new government. Initially, they complained that the new government did not welcome them back in a way that they had expected, leading them to conclude that the ’new’ Gambia would fail them again. Their frustration led some of them to voice threats of violence in order to destroy the newly established peace in the country, if their needs would remain unrecognized. This created a situation in which it seemed that returning too many too quickly could endanger the country’s just initiated democratic transition, as laid out in article 5.1. However, the returnees’ demands were eventually recognized to a certain degree. Some of them set up civil society groups to represent themselves and claim their demands, with the government and also international political actors such as the German embassy and the IOM cooperating with them in various ways. As one consequence, the IOM also adapted their project in order to be able to include all ‘transit returnees’ in the reintegration component (Altrogge & Zanker 2019). Thus, ‘transit returnees’ became eligible to support that is comparable to that for migrants that return through AVRR programmes from European countries. Return from the diaspora For the Barrow government, another type of return was relevant when it came to office: the potential return of highly-skilled migrants from ‘the diaspora’. The diaspora had played a key role in ousting Jammeh, demonstrating both their political influence and their possible willingness to contribute to the country’s future. As further outlined in article 5.1, both the national government and international actors placed high hopes on the skilled and resourceful migrants taking the fall of the dictator as an opportunity, or even call, to return. In June 2017, a few months after the new government took office, the then-Vice President Fatoumata Tambajang declared: “We have to rebuild a nation after 22 years. This brings collective responsibilities. We cannot afford to have so many of us abroad” (Zanker & Altrogge 2017, p. 13). However, these initial hopes for development-effective return did not translate into largerscale return movements, and nor did the idea of skilled return significantly shape the public perception of return. Although reliable numbers are scarce, the broader discourse in The Gambia and among long-settled migrants who had established themselves in Europe and the USA largely dismissed such policy hopes as out of touch with reality, as I could regularly reconfirm in interviews and countless informal conversations. Many argued that migrants who had successfully established themselves abroad would not voluntarily return solely because of the political transition. According to their own perception, there was little urgency to return, and if any return was considered at all, it was contingent on substantial improvements in domestic conditions. These included not only a more favourable business climate but also 52 Secondly, I could examine migrants’ perceptions of temporalities and the impact of ‘time politics’ during that process, paying heed to the shaping of ‘reintegration’ experiences along the bureaucratic times of deportation and AVRR. Scholars working on post-return find that “it can take two years or more to establish self-sufficiency following return” (Hammond 2014, 505), which is not recognized in reintegration assistance implementation, which is usually delivered and monitored in shorter terms. I thus detected the impact of bureaucratic times on return experiences as well as their relations to migrant temporalities. I further reflect on the role of time and temporality for my informants’ experiences, longitudinal data collection and knowledge production in paper 5.5. 4.3 Choice of Methods, Informant Sampling, and Recruitment Qualitative and ethnographic research are key in researching the production of the return migration regime, especially regarding the need to focus on transnational dimensions and the messy translation of concepts and practices, the uneven power dynamics and evolving contestations (Hess, Kasparek & Schwertl 2018). They help us not only understand the complexities and lived experiences of migrants and their experiences with the regime, but also enable the researcher to reconstruct through interpretive methods how professionals at different geographical and institutional sites act as co-creators in migration management. This cocreation does not necessarily manifest in written text such as laws, policies or programme descriptions, neither are they found in statistical material on migration flows, if at all numbers are available. Therefore, I chose mainly qualitative methods for my case study. My publications rely on a set of different types of empirical data. These sets include interviews, media texts and policy documents as well as some participant observation. Additionally, I retrieved secondary statistical data to contextualize and highlight the relevance of the research subject. Qualitative interviews stand at the heart of my studies while other sources were mainly used to validate and contextualize information and perspectives from interviews. Because of this, I give more details on my empirical interview material. I aimed at getting a comprehensive perspective on return migration in the sense that I was keen on exploring which and how different stakeholders impact the return regime. Therefore, I chose to include actors in politics and policy implementation, civil society and migrants themselves. 1. Political and policy decision-makers and implementation actors in Germany and The Gambia. These included state-level institutions (government, administration/ ministries and state agencies) and their institutional implementation partners, mostly non-state domestic organizations and international organizations. 2. Civil society actors and activists in Germany and The Gambia. These included organized and unorganized groups and individuals that aimed at influencing Gambian migration and return and its politics. 3. Migrant actors. These included mainly individuals experiencing state-induced return from Germany to The Gambia, but also migrants in Germany as target group of stateinduced return, and migrants who have returned to The Gambia from other places such as Northern African countries, or through other means than state-induced return. 53 Some representatives fell into more than one of these categories, especially regarding civil society and migrants, in which case I counted the interviews according to the focus of the interview. Recruitment and sampling of interview partners followed different logics regarding the respective stakeholder group. Regarding political as well as civil society representatives, I followed a theoretical sampling strategy to start out with, reaching out to institutions and individuals that were directly involved in return politics and management based on desk research and a first field trip and data collection in The Gambia. The report “The politics of migration governance in the Gambia” (Zanker & Altrogge 2017), which my co-author Franzisca Zanker and I published as a result of this trip, served as an empirical foundation of this sampling. As the first academic publication on the topic, it gained wide visibility among relevant actors in both Germany and The Gambia, and thus served as a door opener for further recruitment. Building on the trust and recognition generated during that phase, I expanded the sample as new institutions and actors became relevant. Building on the recognized expertise, my positionality as a white German academic facilitated access to high-level observational settings. On several occasions, I witnessed German stakeholders speaking with surprising openness about their views on Gambian migration and political negotiations in my presence – an access arguably enabled by a perceived neutrality (wherever that may have come from). Among migrant informants, my main attention lay on interlocutors returning from Germany (and not elsewhere in North Africa or Europe) to The Gambia after the change in government in 2017 through the participation in AVRR or by deportation. Beyond this selection criterion, I aimed at covering a maximum diversified spectrum of experiences in various dimensions, especially regarding the ‘exposure’ to return and reintegration support. Therefore, I chose a recruitment strategy among a maximum range of actors in both Germany and The Gambia that might be able to connect me to interview partners. These included present migrants, civil society in Germany in close contact with Gambian asylum seekers and civil society in The Gambia, as well as state and non-state institutions that are involved in return and reintegration counselling and facilitation for asylum seekers. The sample was going to be rather homogeneous with regard to socio-demographic and biographic characteristics of the migrants due to the make-up of Gambian migrants facing return pressure in Germany. This will become more visible in the sample description further below. Recruitment of migrant informants posed a particular challenge due to the low number of AVRR cases and the high degree of social isolation and shame experienced by deported individuals. After initial unsuccessful attempts to identify AVRR cases in Germany prior to return, I shifted my strategy to contacting individuals during a field stay in The Gambia, thus after their return. This adjustment came with both advantages and limitations. Engaging Gambian asylum seekers on the topics of return is difficult from the outset, as return is a taboo subject, and many avoid discussing their plans with outsiders. Had they spoken with me before their return, they might have been even more likely to perceive me as part of the reintegration infrastructure than they were after returning. In The Gambia, I could still be perceived in this way, though more as a compassionate German counterpart (see also article 5.5). A key 54 disadvantage of post-return recruitment, however, was that my participants had to reconstruct their pre-return decisions, expectations and preparations retrospectively. Such retrospective narratives are often shaped by what happened afterward, which can obscure the original reasoning or emotional landscape that informed earlier decisions (cf. Mixed Migration Centre and University of Edinburgh 2022; Neale 2016; Trąbka, Pustułka & Bell 2024). This limitation was particularly pronounced in the analysis of article 5.2, where I examined participants’ subjective perceptions, including about the in/voluntariness of their return, a dimension that therefore required especially careful interpretation. Over the extended period of data collection, I was eventually able to recruit two cases in which migrants were still planning their AVRR return, interviewing them before and after their returns. These cases were particularly valuable in helping me reflect on the potential biases in other interviews. After all, 14 cases of the individuals I considered in paper 5.2 had been recruited through networks in Germany: six cases through civil society (network of asylum seeker support, including three cases of deportation and AVRR each), five AVRR cases through German state administrative actors (such as reintegration advisors), three further AVRR cases through other German institutional actors involved in AVRR provision, one case (deportation) through his migrant friend, and one case (AVRR) through another researcher’s referral. Through networking in The Gambia, I recruited further six cases that were included in the study: five of them through institutions that are professionally involved in reintegration assistance (three AVRR and two deportation cases), and one through a Gambian researcher’s referral (deportation). I did not include some further migrant interview partners recruited in both Germany and The Gambia in the systematic analysis, because for example they did not have immediate return ambitions, their return ambitions did not materialize after all, or in the case of returned migrants, they did otherwise not fit into my sample. 4.4 Data and Methods In the following, I present the data I collected in Germany and The Gambia, which are listed in more detail in the attachment. The papers relate to different degrees on these materials, which is described more in detail in each paper’s methodological section. 4.4.1 Interview Data Interviews represent the empirical backbone of my thesis. Overall, I conducted around 115 interviews, reaching from semi-structured interviews over ethnographic interviews to background interviews. 39 of these interviews were follow-up interviews with the same informants, adhering to my interest in change processes. These included informants from all three stakeholder groups: migrants, political stakeholders and civil society actors. Some of the interviews I held with more than one person, reaching from two to five individuals. Considering this as well as the follow-up interviews, around 90 individuals took part in interviews with me. In Germany, I conducted overall 28 interviews and carried out participant observations at four events throughout the years of 2017 to 2024. Most of the interviewed individuals were based in Germany, with the exception of a few telephone interviews with returned/ returned and reemigrated individuals that could not be reached in The Gambia. Overall, around ten interviews 55 were held with Gambian migrants based in Germany, focusing on their perspectives on return. Two of those actually returned to The Gambia and were added to the set of comparative data analysis. Around nine interviews in Germany were held with representatives of institutions that were involved in return politics, administration and management. Around ten of the interviews were conducted among civil society representatives, including migrant activists, migrant organisations and organisations supporting Gambian asylum seekers in Germany. In addition to the interviews, I kept contact via social media with some of the returned migrants I accompanied over a longitudinal time (see article 5.5) while being in Germany. Data collection in The Gambia took place throughout six field stays of an overall time of almost six months, with a major three-month field research in 2019, and shorter field trips in 2017 (two weeks), 2018 (one week), 2020 (two weeks), 2021 (three weeks), and 2023 (three weeks). During my stays in The Gambia, I carried out overall 87 interviews. These include around 24 interviews among representatives of institutions that were related to the politics, administration or management of migration, return and reintegration in one way or another, such as representatives of Gambian state institutions (government, administration, management), and those of German state and EU-related institutions based in The Gambia. Twelve interviews were held among civil society representatives in The Gambia, including civil society organisations, journalists as well as activists, with this differentiation being somewhat fluent. Around 51 interviews in The Gambia were held with migrants. Most of these were conversations with one individual, with a few exceptions of focus group discussions with two to 15 individuals that were somehow engaged together before as civil society actors and jointly presented their perspectives to me. The migrant interviews in The Gambia further include 29 secondand third-time follow-up interviews which I conducted with 22 returned migrants for the longitudinal study of state-induced return from Germany (see article 5.2). In addition to the listed interviews, I held uncountable side conversations about migration and return as well as political developments in the country with Gambian citizens. They had, for example, migrated and returned themselves, had family members or friends living abroad, or otherwise had something to say about the issues at stake. They likewise informed my perspectives, despite no systematic analysis. Table 7 sums up all conducted interviews that informed my analyses. Number of interviews along stakeholder groups in Germany and The Gambia Stakeholder group Interviews .. of which in Germany .. of which in the Gambia Politics and management 33 9 24 civil society 22 10 12 migrants 61 10 51 overall 115 28 88 Table 7: Number of interviews along stakeholder groups in Germany and The Gambia 56 The conducted interviews followed semi-structured question guides for the specific target groups. The migrant interview question guides (see Appendix B) were developed along theoretical considerations and techniques proposed by Jan Kruse (2014), aiming for a reconstructive-hermeneutic analysis. The question guides for interviews with professionals followed a narrower approach and were adapted to the respective institution’s function as well as the purpose of the interview at the time. I understand professionals working in institutions as experts that carry specific expert knowledge due to the function they fulfil within the institution they work for and the interests that these institutions hold. As individuals, they contain a socially and professionally ascribed role that represents the institution, usually based on specific formal qualification (Meuser & Nagel 1991). Their knowledge is shaped by their professional experiences but also by their personal position in a particular cultural context, along which they make meaning beyond an institution’s formal positions. For example, Gambian practitioners in the field of AVRR provision in The Gambia contextualize their professional knowledge differently than practitioners in Germany, who interrelate their expertise more with their cultural knowledge of migration and return embedded in Germany. In addition to institutional knowledge, various experts also reveal practice knowledge of broader regime functions, for example how the referencing of migrants between different service-providers works. Their interviews thus contained information on and opinions about the practices and actors of migration management as perceived by the respective individual, changes in policy and migration dynamics, as well as their meaning-making around these issues. Most of the characteristics of ‘expert interviews’ also broadly account for interviews held among civil society representatives. As individuals who engage in civil society organisations or with the goal to represent a certain social function as individual, they can be considered as ‘experts’ in the development of the concerned field of action. Depending on the informant’s role, the question guides focused on the evolvement of certain activism, their demands and activities of the institution or individual, as well as their interactions with and opinions about other actors within the migration regime. The question guides developed for interviews with migrants were broader and more extensive. They included biographical dimensions, various aspects on their pre-migratory life, migration decision, their life in Germany and experiences with institutions, their engagement with the question of return and – in cases of AVRR – return preparation, their physical return experience and lastly their post-return life. Additionally, they covered questions on opinions about political institutions and potential political engagement prior, during and after migrating. I adapted the interviews with migrants in their degree of openness and closeness depending on how the individual reacted to my questioning. In some cases, the interviewee oriented himself closely along the guiding questions, in other cases I had to apply more open stimuli in order to create a comfortable and trust-enhancing atmosphere. The information I was seeking in narrations was sometimes given in conversations that lasted several hours and included eating or spending time together, which either happened after or instead of a more formal, timeconstrained interview. During these sequences, some interlocutors shared additional insights 57 that they had not revealed in the more formal part or might likely not have revealed if I had confronted them with a limited time slot. These experiences highlight the strengths of ethnographic interviewing when engaging with migrants. In order to capture trajectories over time, different methods may be used besides interviews, such as mapping or continuous ethnographic observation. However, in my case, repeated indepth interviews prove as best to realize, for various reasons on some of which I reflect in article 5.5. For the second and third follow-up interviews, question guides were adapted to the specific case and the information I had received during the first interview. The migrant interviews I used for the post-return trajectory analysis (article 5.2) were analysed with support of MaxQDA along a time-sensitive deductive code system capturing different aspects derived from reintegration research as well as additional social and political dimensions. I further analysed them along a systematized framework which I further describe in the article. 4.4.2 Participant Observation Participant observations in Germany took place at meetings and workshops within the field of return politics and management. They were mainly supposed to give opportunity for informal conversation, networking and background ethnographic impressions. Therefore, I did not take a systematic approach in entering the field for observations, but took opportunities to participate when they arose, mainly through invitation by the initiators. Table 8 summarizes the amount of systematic observations I conducted. Number of observations along stakeholder groups in Germany and The Gambia Stakeholder group Observations .. of which in Germany .. of which in the Gambia Politics, administration 5 4 1 civil society, migrants 2 - 2 Table 8: Number of observations along stakeholder groups in Germany and The Gambia The observations among political and management stakeholders in both countries were conducted at strategic planning meetings and workshops of return and reintegration professionals, while the ones among civil society were conducted among meetings of returned migrant groups. Among returned migrant individuals, I made ethnographic observations when interviewing them, for example at their homes or when they showed me their businesses, which are not listed in the table because they are difficult to quantify. 4.4.3 Documents and Social Media The interview material was further complemented with document analysis. The sources include texts published by political institutions and international organizations, in public media, particularly newspapers, and social media, particularly Facebook. The selection of text was both broad and highly selective. I collected most articles published in German newspapers on Gambian migrants, and political actors positioning themselves towards Gambian migration and depictions of backway migration and return issues in major Gambian newspapers and online 58 outlets. I also included some material that activists posted on Facebook as one of their most important communication channels. While the empirical basis of my dissertation are interviews, document and media analysis fulfilled the purpose of data triangulation where this was deemed necessary or prove particularly interesting for the specific question I was following. For example, it was necessary to validate certain information or reconstruct the timeline of key events, for example the timeline of the moratorium in comparison to deportations, or the political dynamics these triggered in social media. It offered particularly interesting insights when I could critically contrast certain narratives and interpretations of practices and events from interviews, for example regarding migrants’ perceptions of access to certain reintegration services, or trace convergences and divergences of activists’ (self-)representation in interviews versus the media. In other words, media text and policy documents revealed different perspectives on the same issue. Newspaper articles gave updates about certain developments that were important to my case, but more importantly also revealed which actors communicate how and what to the addressed public. Text material produced by institutions – including state institutions but also civil society organizations – in which they display issues of return and reintegration management (such as pamphlets or posters by the IOM) or political strategies around return and development (such as the Gambian government’s National Development Plan (Republic of The Gambia, 2018) reveal their understanding of the depicted issues and also reveal which kind of information they see necessary to communicate via text and to whom. Text documents were analysed selectively and according to the needs of my analyses. In sum, my research employed a longitudinal, multi-sited case study approach grounded in qualitative and interpretive methodologies to explore the emergence and functioning of the return regime between Germany and The Gambia. The extended case study design allowed for iterative adaptation to a dynamically evolving research field and captured both structural processes and the lived experiences of diverse actors embedded within it. Drawing on interviews, observations and media analyses across three different stakeholder groups – migrants, political-administrative and civil society actors – offered the different yet intersecting roles in shaping the return regime. The temporally sensitive approach proved crucial for tracing changes in migration governance and activism as well as the trajectories and shifting perceptions of return migrants. My position as a white German researcher demanded for a thorough reflection of the power-imbalances between myself and my migrant study participants. It also afforded particular access to institutional stakeholders which further informed the ethnographic insights of the study. Ultimately, the research design reflects the complexities and contestations of the return regime itself, and the need for qualitative research to remain attentive to temporalities as well as positionalities and the co-production of knowledge. 59 5 SUMMARY OF PUBLICATIONS In the following section, I present in greater depth the five academic papers through which I contribute to the scholarly debates outlined in Section 2. I explain how these contributions relate to the research questions and methodological approach developed above and highlight their conceptual distinctions and overlaps. These five papers consist of four peer-reviewed journal articles (papers 5.1 to 5.4) and one book chapter in an edited volume on methodologies in deportation studies (paper 5.5). The two earliest papers (papers 5.1 and 5.4) are co-authored with Franzisca Zanker, with whom I conducted joint research on The Gambia prior to formally beginning my PhD project, as described in Sub-section 4.3. While part of the empirical material was collected collaboratively, both papers rely on additional data I gathered during my PhD fieldwork (2018, 2019) and on conceptual reflections developed in discussion with Franzisca. Overall, the five papers examine the agencies of four different migrant groups at different times and in different roles. Paper 5.1 compares the political influence of transit return and diaspora return at an early stage of The Gambia’s political transition; paper 5.2 analyses post-return experiences of migrants after state-induced return from Germany; and paper 5.4 focuses on the political relevance of transnational anti-deportation activism involving asylum seekers in Germany. Paper 5.3 shifts the perspective to the state and international levels of return politics, while paper 5.5 reflects on methodological and ethical aspects of knowledge production on post-return experiences. An overview of the five papers is presented in Table 9 at the end of this section. What follows are extended summaries of these texts. 5.1 The Political Influence of Return: From Diaspora to Libyan Transit Returnees In this study, my co-author Franzisca Zanker and I examine the political influence of migrant return to The Gambia soon after the governmental change from Jammeh’s dictatorship to Barrow’s transitional government. Our central objective was to analyse the possibilities for political influence of two different groups of returnees that became politically active at that time: highly skilled diaspora returnees and low-skilled returnees from Libyan transit zones. We argue that previous research insufficiently captures potential avenues of political influence of returnees because it focuses either on the deportation policies of host countries or the development impact of highly skilled diaspora returnees. In our contribution, we show that different kinds of returnees, regardless of their social status or a qualification that would president them for political involvement, can assert political claims and thus exert political influence. To achieve our objectives, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews with various actors in the Gambian migration context, including policymakers, politicians, civil society activists, diaspora leaders, and academic experts. We also analysed text material produced by these actors, especially around the political self-perception of the diaspora stakeholders considered in the paper. The data analysed for this article is based on two fieldtrips. In May/June 2017, Franzisca Zanker and I collected data for a pilot study (Zanker & Altrogge 2017) which we analysed for the article, particularly in relation to the role of transit returnees. This was complemented by fieldwork I conducted in February 2018, during which I gathered additional material on the diaspora involvement. This aspect had become visible only after our joint trip. 60 Among the interviews from May/June 2017 was a focus group discussion with 15 young men who had returned from Libya under the IOM’s ‘Voluntary Humanitarian Return from Libya’ programme. The development of ideas followed an iterative process between the two authors. The promising perspective of the comparative approach we chose in the article came to light through the fieldwork and interviews I conducted in 2018. The preceding data analysis and drafting of the text was done in a collaborative manner between my co-author and me. Our results show that both highly skilled diaspora returnees and low-skilled returnees from Libya managed to exert political influence in the new political context of Gambia, attaining to the differing interests between the two migrant groups. We engage with the differing modes of access to the political sphere that the two migrant groups carved out. Highly skilled diaspora returnees were explicitly invited by the government to contribute to the political and economic transformation of the country. They received a direct political influence, which was also manifested in their involvement in developing the National Development Plan, the establishment of a Think Tank which was supposed to get qualified migrants involved in national policy-making, and the creation of a dedicated Diaspora Directorate (GDD). In contrast, low-skilled returnees from Libya were primarily perceived as recipients of state support, such as reintegration programmes. Frustrated by the lack of access to these programmes and a lack of political representation, the returnees organized themselves into the selfrepresentation groups ‘Youth Against Irregular Migration’ (YAIM) and ‘Gambian Returnees from the Backway’. Through collective mobilization and, in some cases, threats of violence, they exerted indirect political influence. This was evident in the retroactive adaptation of IOM programmes, the establishment of returnee-specific activities under the Youth Empowerment Project (YEP), and the recognition of their role in the National Development Plan. As a consequence of our findings, we suggest that the distinction between ‘high-skilled’/regular migrant and ‘low-skilled’/irregular migrant, which is often central in the question which migrants contribute to the political development in their countries of origin, does not properly represent migrants’ heterogeneous political agencies. However, it has political implications, as it leads to different expectations towards these groups by political stakeholders and policy measures applied to them. We therefore advocate for a more differentiated view of returnees, a greater consideration of their heterogeneous perspectives and avenues for political agency in migration and development policy. We also argue that the eventual representation of the political claims of the returnees from transit countries was instrumental for the transition government to attain to its rhetoric of democratic transition and even contributed to keeping social stability during the volatile times in which meanings around democratization and citizen responsiveness had just started to be negotiated. 5.2 Income Prospect Trajectories after State-Induced Return from Germany to The Gambia: AVRR as ‘Slow Deportation’ The article compares the income prospects of returned migrants after deportation and after participating in AVRR. The study is based on 48 interviews conducted with 20 migrants who returned from Germany to The Gambia between 2018 and 2019. Of these, twelve migrants participated in an AVRR programme and eight were deported. Overall, I show that while both 61 types of return generate different temporal dynamics, they both tend to lead to similarly challenging economic trajectories that become difficult to distinguish over time. While AVRR often entails a disillusionment process about the inadequacy of post-return hopes, deportation, against the backdrop of inhumane deportation practice and subsequent despair, can likewise lead to reorientation and the participation in reintegration programmes. Considering the overall low chances of establishing positive income prospects after any state-induced return, AVRR resembles a ‘slow deportation’. In order to show these trajectories, I applied a longitudinal qualitative ethnographic interview design. In the literature review, I first carve out the differences between deportation and AVRR concepts, crystallizing their major differentiation points to a higher level of agency with regards to decision-making and preparation in AVRR on the one hand, and granted reintegration assistance on the other. AVRR, by definition, includes assistance services funded and organized by the country of origin and its implementing partners, stretching from preto post-return time spaces. For deporting states, offering this assistance to AVRR participants while denying it to deported individuals is considered key for the return incentivisation to work. I then go on to show that the distinction along these two categories becomes often blurred in practice, which had already led critical scholars to characterize AVRR as ‘soft deportation’ in the spatio-temporal context of the destination country before returning. Through ‘soft power’, deporting states enforce their interests in returning deportable individuals by convincing migrants to participate in AVRR. However, I argue that post-return studies have so far not developed methodologies that allow to follow through with this characterization in the full spatio-temporal dimension of return regimes, including the space and time after return, based on the epistemological path dependencies in post-return studies described in 2.4. In the analytical section of the article, I comparatively examine the income prospects of migrants based on four groups of agency experiences: deportation without reintegration assistance, deportation with reintegration assistance, AVRR with basic reintegration assistance, and AVRR with extended reintegration assistance. I find that the spectrum between rather satisfying and deteriorating income prospects is found among all four groups. The spectrum among deportation reaches from some deported migrants that were among the most content in the sample regarding their income prospects, while others faced continuous downward dynamics. At the same time, numerous AVRR participants also found themselves in situations of protracted challenging to devastated income prospects. Deportation is, therefore, not a categorically larger obstacle to positive income prospect development after return than AVRR. I also portray the differing temporal dynamics of expectations and agency that accompany AVRR and deportation. During and closely after return, the differences between the two are distinctively strong. The shock, anger, and confusion after deportation evoke emotional distress and impulsive denial towards the new situation. Meanwhile, with AVRR, migrants have a contentment-based orientation of refunneling income prospects at the place of return. They connect a relief about being back to the agency in their return decision-making. Accordingly, they arrive with higher self-esteem and expectations about their abilities to continue their journeys in that positive vein. After the harsh disempowering experience of deportation, 68 6 KEY INSIGHTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCHOLARLY DEBATES In my dissertation, I asked how migrants develop and navigate their socio-political agency in the transnational migration regime in the face of the threat of state-induced return. To answer this overarching question, I examined (1) which forms of migrant agency towards regime actors emerge among migrants, AVRR returnees and deportees, (2) how they position themselves towards involved political actors, concepts and practices, and (3) how their positionings influence developments in the origin country. With these three questions, I delve into the spatiotemporal unfolding of the regime along the migration cycle of the (potentially) returning migrants. I further address various forms of agency among migrants with differing social conditions and at different points of their migratory endeavour. Lastly, I studied broader effects of migrant agency for the country of origin/return. My dissertation answers these questions and makes broader contributions to the literature in three major fields, which I present in the following. First, I link migrant agency to the formation of a transnational return regime (6.1). Here, I relate to my findings on migrant agency which I discussed in three of my dissertation articles, highlighting how migrants at different stages of their migratory experience have developed agency in different kinds of ways towards political return regime actors, and how their different social positions enabled them to do so (or not). Paper 5.1 contrasts the political influence of the regularized diaspora versus transit returnees in the early phase of the governmental transition. Paper 5.2 dwells on how the experiences of migrants after state-induced return challenge policy assumptions as well as the concept of reintegration, unmasking AVRR as ‘slow deportation’. Paper 5.3 discusses the political impact of present migrants with unsecure residence status on the return politics of their country of origin/return. Second, I relate my work to debates about political development and democratization (6.2). In this regard, paper 5.4 examines how the government of an origin/return country is pushed to better adhere to the interests of migrants abroad in return politics in an unequal international setting, where more powerful, more developed destination states prioritize their deportation interests against less powerful countries of origin/return in volatile development dynamics. But the influence of migrant agency goes beyond the field of return politics per se and also contributes to the shaping of state-society relations in a dynamic context of democratization, which I touch upon in papers 5.2 and 5.3. Lastly, in Sub-section 6.3, I explain how my temporal methodology helps counter research biases in reintegration studies and contributes to a more critical, power-sensitive understanding of return experiences. While these reflections are mainly rooted in the methodological discussions of paper 5.5, they build closely on the empirical insights from paper 5.2 and the observation of ‘slow deportation’. In this sub-section, I also suggest more comprehensive future research on ‘time politics’ in the return regime. 69 6.1 The Return Regime and Migrant Agency In my research, I observed the formation of a return regime that is analytically distinguishable from both the broader migration regime and more narrowly defined deportation regimes. This conceptual differentiation has important implications for future research on return. By analytically distinguishing return regimes from broader migrations or narrower deportation regimes, I offer a new conceptual lens for understanding return as a politically and socially contested process embedded in a transnational field. This reconceptualization enables more investigation of how return is negotiated, shaped and enacted in countries of origin/return and actors based there, which I will further explain in the following. To start out with, I applied the regime perspective as a methodological tool to identify actors and processes of structuration through action. The fact that the involved actors are located in different countries characterized this regime as transnational. While migration regimes tend to be defined beyond a mere national scale (Rass & Wolff 2018), the production of migration regimes is often focused on the more powerful institutional actors of the destination context, sometimes also considering their collaboration partners in third countries, and sometimes their interaction with migrant actors, but mostly those residing in the destination context. In analyses of the deportation regime, this focus on destination contexts is present as well. With this, the important question remains how to include the transnational enactment of the migration regime, which is particularly necessary when it comes to return. I propose that, alongside existing analyses focused on migration and deportation regimes – typically from a destination-country perspective – we need to develop the concept of ‘return regimes’ with a lens that foregrounds the post-return context, emphasizing its institutional, social and discursive embeddedness in the country of origin/return. Return regimes offer a more holistic view on return both as a process and a political issue, accounting for their social embeddedness, allowing us to detect the ways in which state-induced return is situated within broader social and political structures and debates in the return context. While analyses of deportation regimes also examine the production of AVRR, they tend to concentrate on the mechanisms leading up to return, or what triggers deportation in a global deportation regime (Lindberg & Khosravi 2021). Thus, they remain centred on the spatial and institutional logics of destination countries and actors. In contrast, return is mainly enacted in the spatio-temporal context of the country of origin/return, shaped by political negotiations and cooperation, migrant experiences and their presence in their communities. We therefore need more research that foregrounds the post-return context within regime perspectives. Such an approach can enrich both more narrowly oriented analyses of return implementation as well as broader inquiries into the social embeddedness of return, which I will briefly explain. With regards to the former, state-induced return generates institutional dynamics in the country of origin/return, leading to changes in what Rass and Wolff identify as secondary practices (Rass & Wolff 2018). In the destination country, migration and deportation regimes might involve overlapping institutional actors and infrastructures. For example, the same institution might be tasked with both integration assistance and reintegration counselling. However, in the origin/return context, the return regime involves a different array of political and administrative 70 actors that are not necessarily considered in deportation regime approaches but whose institutional logics influence the regime. For example, while in many contexts of origin/return, the IOM is funded by destination countries to provide reintegration assistance, and additional service providers may become involved in delivering reintegration assistance, seizing on the economic and political opportunity presented by this expanding field. In this competitive environment, domestic and international organizations may vie for funds and responsibilities, and potentially operate in the absence of meaningful involvement by state institutions that would otherwise be responsible for broader social service provision. Moreover, development cooperation may become part of the return regime, an intersection that has received limited attention in existing deportation regime literature. Considering broader social embeddedness, the return regime is shaped not only by primary practices (the actual returns) and secondary practices (the institutional setup), but also by tertiary practices (Rass & Wolff 2018). These refer to how actors claim “influence on or maybe even shape discourse on migration matters, indirectly impact[ing] migration by altering its meaning, challenging categorizations, or attempting to mobilize others through public expression” (Rass & Wolff 2018, 47). Hence, political tensions and conceptual contestations and blurs that occur because of the two different places between which return is created and enacted are in play. It is important to engage with how deportation is set within a contingent spectrum of return also in the origin/return context, ranging from deportation over AVRR to returns of skilled, financially successful or transnationally mobile migrants often labelled the ‘diaspora’. The way how these categories and their demarcations are politically and socially constructed – unlikely the same at both ends – influences migration and politics around stateinduced return. One concrete illustration of these discursive tertiary practices is the differentiation between AVRR and deportation. While this differentiation is highly important in destination country context, it nearly disappears for actors in the context of origin/return. According to state actors and even among civil society actors in the destination context, AVRR holds promises of personal dignity, access to reintegration assistance, and with this more chances for a prosperous future than staying at the destination under the offered precarious irregularising conditions. In the context of origin/return, AVRR does not qualify as a more prosperous future than staying at the destination or being deported. In the origin/return context, deportation as the consequence of a migrant’s ultimate effort to stay in Europe is comprehendible, while opting for AVRR is not. Accordingly, deported individuals are seen to need reintegration support as well to be somewhat acceptable, which stands in direct contradiction to the concept of deportation the way deporting states envision it. Tertiary practices also impact the return regime as state actors in country of origin/return must often link return-related responsibilities with other political fields and governance-related responsibilities of domestic governance, and often more central ones. These include areas such as development cooperation or social work, and equally the public legitimation of governing decisions. Many origin countries are embedded in development cooperation frameworks and negotiate their priorities with donor states. The donor states increasingly attempt to incorporate 71 their own interests regarding migration and return in the development agendas of partner countries. As a result, the return regime may reinforce containment-based understandings of development, which tend to override more emancipatory perspectives associated with the migration-development nexus. These containment logics conflict with the views and interests of societies in developing countries, where migration is widely seen as a development opportunity and where legal migration pathways are seen as the greater chance. Governments in countries of origin/return may struggle to incorporate such societal perspectives into their development agendas through negotiations with donors. This disconnect can make their approaches appear less citizen-oriented and more aligned with external policy pressures. Building on these observations on how a return regime establishes, my dissertation contributes a more differentiated perspective of how migrant agency manifests within it. In migration regime and deportation regime analyses, there are engaged efforts to acknowledge and conceptualize migrant agency in shaping the respective regime. Researchers find scopes like ‘Handlungsspielräume’ (Lipphardt & Schwarz 2018) for migrants in which they can unfold agency according to their ‘Eigensinnigkeit’ (Benz & Schwenken 2005) that might undermine migration control. They also find different forms of migrant political activism shaping the regime. Migrants here often engage with the actors and infrastructures in their immediate environments, in their present co-existence. Approaching my case, I had therefore expected that corporate agency would form among migrant individuals after their return, while assisted or left alone by institutions. I wanted to “Follow the people!” (Lipphardt & Schwarz 2018) in order to explore along migrant’s experiences on their trajectories how they interact with the regime. Informed by theories about political remittances that highlight the formation of particular political opinions, I expected their migration experiences to create specific political attitudes. After they had managed to reach a Western, wealthy nation with established democratic institutions – which was in both regards different from their place of origin and which they had found compelling in one way or another – but were rejected by that very same state, I expected that that would impact political self-consciousness at least of some. However, these assumptions proved rather false, which teaches us some things about migrant agency in the return regime and how to study it. Fundamentally, it is important to pay more analytical attention towards which migrants, where and when develop which form of agency in the return regime, or in other words: how migrants develop agency beyond their receiving role but as co-shapers of the regime. Turning to the most directly involved migrants – those who return through the regime infrastructure – they are struggling with their ‘reintegration’ in the sense of surviving and adhering to the various social expectations towards provision in their social environment while at the same time confronted with feelings of doubt or shame. Their agency cannot be considered as subversion to the return regime: if they accept reintegration assistance, they tend to remain primary agents, as they try to make use of these opportunity infrastructures as good as they can. Yet, if they do not receive assistance, they fall out of the regime. They do not stand in an active interchange with regime actors and do not stand under the rules and regulations of the return regime anymore, because they dissolve into the societal structures of the country of origin/return. They are also largely excluded from being researched in reintegration research (see further below). 72 The question then is, what kind of agency can and do they nonetheless enact under these conditions? Actively withdrawing from reintegration opportunities, for example because of scepticism towards certain service-providing actors, can be interpreted as a political act in itself. It co-establishes the boundaries of the return regime. Secondly, some scholars find a high remigration potential among forcefully returned migrants (Schuster & Majidi 2015), which would be a bold act in opposition to the return regime when migrants approach the same destination. But this remigration does not necessarily set in. In my sample, for example, the vast majority did not remigrate and the majority did not even closely consider it (yet). Thus, while the option of remigrating exists, many might also stay. For them, developing agency – especially corporate agency – appears more constrained than for migrants who are still at the destination, where their mere presence and endurance often constitute a form of resistance to the laws and norms enforced by powerful actors in the return regime. This means that migrants who are legally supposed to leave but do not do so have agency in the return regime. My work enables to consider more closely how this kind of agency differs from more corporate agency among staying migrants, and what the effects of both kinds of agency can affect the country of origin/return differently. As we have seen, migrants who themselves stand under return pressure against their will in destination contexts can turn towards their origin country’s society – government, media, civil society – in order to address their interests and foster and shape opinion and activism formation for a public interest. This means that in the return regime, migrants can develop transnational corporate agency that seeks to influence the agency of the origin/return country’s government within the return regime. This originoriented activism is a new direction of migrants’ activism (see also Lecadet 2018). It expands, on the one hand, diaspora’s transnational political activism which so far does not address the issue of return politics as part of diaspora politics. On the other hand, it expands the spectrum of activism of irregular migrants and asylum seekers in its spatial dimension, as such activism is usually addressed towards regional, national or local political actors in the destination context, or towards a global audience. They find resonance among the government based on the return regime’s entanglement with development politics, which I will address next. 6.2 Political Development and Democratization The second key contribution of this dissertation lies in showing how migrant agency within the return regime intersects with political development and democratization processes in the country of origin/return. As I have laid out in Sub-sections 2.3 and 2.4, the way that the relationships between return and development are understood differs between institutional actors in academia and politics, as well as between different times. At the same time, understandings are dependent on dynamics in international cooperation. Overall, it is always necessary to ask which kind of return we consider, and which kind of development we consider when we speak about the return-development nexus in the specific time and space in which it is negotiated, both in scholarly works as well as in politics. First, I show how migrants can actively claim a voice in democratization during periods of political transition in their country of origin/return. In the case at hand, migrant stakeholders became part of the reconstitution of democratic institutions and discourse. Migration was not 73 peripheral to these developments but became one of the arenas in which democratization was negotiated. My findings suggest that the role of migration and return within development strategies and democratization are renegotiated at times when developing, migrant-sending country reconstitutes their democratic principles. In the age of migration (Castles, Haas & Miller 2014), when a developing country’s society (re-)constitutes its democratic mechanisms as a process of national political development, it is likely that this will also include the topic of migration within this (Vigneswaran & Quirk 2015). The relationship between state power and mobility is negotiated between the state and its (potentially mobile) populations. Migrants may organize, protest, or negotiate with state authorities to secure their rights and interests through establishing democratic means, for example by challenging (former) authoritarian practices, limited freedom of expression or participation, and pushing for more transparent and accountable governance. The struggle over mobility rights is thus enacted on a platform for broader democratic claim-making, such as demands for social security, justice, and the recognition of different migrant groups within the political system, as we have seen in the case on hand. Second, I show how migrant actors frame their political claims in ways that resonate with dominant development imaginaries, and how these framings differ depending on their social positioning and political leverage. As I have shown in papers 5.1 and 5.3, different groups of migrants might claim a voice for more pluralism – reaching from the established ‘diaspora’ with a higher social status to migrant groups that have not yet successfully established abroad. However, they might need to use different kinds of strategies to make their claims. My findings highlight the different strategies migrant stakeholder groups use in order to achieve impact. ‘Diaspora’ migrants might more easily be recognized as valuable cooperation partners by state actors in various fields of policy design (see paper 5.1), not-yet-established migrants have to legitimize the domestic importance of their claims, which in this case was done by underlining the importance of civil society and citizen responsiveness in the transition phase (see papers 5.1 and 5.3). The need for such different discursive legitimization strategies can be tracked back to the ways in which each migrant groups’ claims can be aligned with the development imaginaries of more powerful external actors and their priorities in development cooperation. The key question, then, is how migrant actors can frame their claims so that they align with the dominant development strategies and without overly contradicting the interests of strong actors in the negotiation framework. On one end of the spectrum, approaches in which migrants put efforts into maximizing the development impact of previous regular migration (or migrants that have so far managed to secure their right to stay abroad) – for example by improving transnational remittance management or delivering professional expertise in policy fields – are relatively easy for a government to integrate without contesting migration-development understandings of international partners. On the other end of the spectrum, claims for more legal pathways or rights to stay abroad cannot be easily integrated. Such claims lie beyond the scope of domestic politics. Migration governance is overall highly dependent on other states’ attitudes and according laws and regulations towards migration. As the less powerful states, many developing nations’ governments do not have the political leverage to produce more accessible legal migration 74 pathways in order for their citizens’ positive development hopes to be fulfilled in accordance with destination states’ laws and norms. Moreover, such claims do not align with the understandings of the migration-development-nexus that are employed in current development cooperation approaches. Migration-related development cooperation has strongly aligned with the bordering and securitization politics of the destination states, which are development partners and funders at the same time (Tonah, Setrana & Arthur 2017; Frowd 2018; Moyo 2020). This dynamic mirrors destination state’s continued understanding of migration as an expression of local under-development (Schapendonk & Smith 2018), which they seek to address through containment development approaches (Landau 2019). Thus, instead of programmatically strengthening legal emigration strategies as an expression of and source for more development, contemporary migration-related development cooperation in West Africa concentrates on immobilizing interventions. Such interventions include, for instance, improving employability and raising employment options for potential migrants in the domestic labour market, or the reintegration of returning migrants. However, what does lie in the scope of origin states is how to cooperate in return politics with destination countries. State-induced return underscores their population’s imaginaries about migration as option to pursue a better life. As my work has shown, this is where origin states can potentially use their political leverage in favour of that migrant group’s claims and the population’s interests more broadly. When origin countries oppose to cooperate in destination states’ efforts to return rejected asylum seekers, this can, to some degree, also challenge destination states’ interpretations of the migration/return-development nexus. More concretely, migrants’ claims that could be brought in line with existing development approaches carry higher chances of success – such as creating reintegration assistance eligibility. After all, the ‘protective exclusion’ which the Gambian government enacted towards rejected asylum seekers was also explained with adherence to democratic standards and domestic underdevelopment: the origin country government’s claim for its responsibility to allow demonstrations as part of freedom of speech, the need to protect the volatile political stability of the new democratic government, and the argument that their social security and economic sector was too underdeveloped to reintegrate deported individuals. Yet, the Gambian government’s attempt to assert domestic sovereignty – by aligning with citizens’ views of migration as development chance – came at the cost of external norms and expectations. Ultimately, this effort did not convince the international partners to be established as a shared programmatic goal. These discursive strategies by migrant actors set the stage of how states of origin/return respond to external pressures and define their own roles within the return-development framework. Considering this, I argue thirdly that domestic state-society negotiations around return can influence international political positioning to a degree that origin/return states need to redefine their sovereignty and developmental agency in a postcolonial context. The discussion of the case of The Gambia has taught us that domestic state-society negotiation dynamics can trigger inter-state political negotiations that are inherently linked to concepts of (democratic) statehood. Paying more scholarly attention to origin states’ strategies and domestic state-society negotiations about how to encounter destination states’ demands of return cooperation can enable us to detect strategies of how societies and governments in origin states deal with the 75 unequal power balances within the international system in which migration takes place. A range of state agency between cooperation and resistance (Zanker 2023) are an expression of a broader negotiation about ‘development’. This presupposes a broader understanding of political development as something beyond a set of domestic indicators, but as the consequence of a multitude of ever-continuing negotiations processes and practices within and between societies in the global community in which interests of actors and actor groups on different societal levels, including state representatives just as much as migrant individuals take part. 6.3 Temporal Methodologies to Counter Research Biases in Reintegration Research Research on the post-return stage after state-induced return has developed along bifurcated lines: reintegration studies that consider AVRR mainly, often policy-driven and quantitatively oriented, and ethnographic post-deportation studies, rooted in critical migration and border studies. These distinct epistemologies have created conceptual blind spots that my longitudinal qualitative comparative approach seeks to bridge. The politically most recognized and academically most streamlined research on post-return is reintegration research. This research angle follows an epistemological path dependency that prioritizes AVRR returns. With rising political emphasis on AVRR, scholars have called for “systematic knowledge” (Paasche 2014) and clearer definitions to “move the AVRR agenda forward” (Kuschminder 2017b) – a policydriven interest, even if allowing critique, often from an angle of applicability. Hence, empirical studies nonetheless tend to focus on contexts where policy already aligns reintegration with AVRR, understanding reintegration as a pathway after AVRR. Hence, it largely overlooks deportation-related post-return dynamics and how these could inform knowledge about AVRR, reintegration and intriguing effects of policy assumptions and practices. These biases have formed in the current ‘paradigm pendulum’ swing (de Haas 2010) that links reintegration to development cooperation. AVRR promises development potentials – more so than it might be if post-deportation experiences would inform reintegration research stronger. Deportation studies, meanwhile, have developed along other epistemological and methodological lines. Most deportation research engages with the pre-deportation time-spaces, the legal and political frameworks governing deportability, and the sociopolitical mechanisms of enforcement, often in relation to state control and border security (Coutin 2015; De Genova & Peutz 2010; Radziwinowiczówna 2024). Post-deportation perspectives constitute a small subfield therein, limited by, among other things, challenges of tracking deportees post-return, including logistical obstacles and concerns over research ethics in volatile environments. Additionally, these studies, just as the whole post-deportation research field, is characterized by ethnographic approaches, prioritizing emic concepts (Drotbohm 2015; Drotbohm & Hasselberg 2015; Radziwinowiczówna 2024). During my research, I accordingly encountered scepticism about my approach from deportation scholars viewed the comparison of deportation to AVRR as ethically overburdening because of potential relativizing implications of the inhumane deportation practices that comparative findings could reveal. Such reservations highlight the embedded path dependencies between deportation and reintegration research, reinforcing the knowledge abyss between development- 76 linked reintegration studies that seek to generalize and partly also inform policymaking and ethnographically oriented post-deportation research. Following de Haas (2010), we have to accept that research on post-return is part of the very return regime it investigates. The parallel embeddedness of conceptualizations and terminologies in policy and academic debates therefore does not mean that scholars should withdraw from negotiations about meaning-making but to proactively and critically engage with the analytic terms they use and co-produce. Post-return research has to reflexively engage with reintegration studies and the framings it creates. My research has contributed to this through a multi-sited, longitudinal qualitative methodology. A multi-sited and longitudinal qualitative approach can adhere to the diversity of return regime actors and the interlinkages of their agencies in time and space with a strengthened focus on the post-return spatio-temporal context. This means, first, to understand the agency of migrants beyond their receiving role but as coshapers of the regime which happens in processes that can only be captured within extended time periods. We have to learn more about why migrants develop primary and corporate agencies at which temporal points at the individual level as well as at the level of regime formation. So far, quantitative studies on reintegration experiences – which are high in demand because they seemingly allow generalizable insights into post-return situations – focus on the consequences of (state-induced) return for the individual, or potentially also the communities into which they return, but not on broader consequences of returns and return politics on the development in countries of origin/return. They tend to understand the reintegration infrastructure as service deliverer rather than part of the negotiations within a return regime. On the other hand, ethnographic studies – usually also focusing on emic perspectives of individuals rather than analysing their connections to the politically shaped contexts – do not sufficiently engage with politically co-constructed terminology and conceptualization. If post-return is studied as a measurable process on the individual level instead of as part of a return regime, this sidelines the geopolitical figurations in which reintegration experiences on the individual level are linked to interest-vested actors, knowledge and practices. Nonetheless, data collected among migrant individuals takes a central role in return regime analysis also. Here, qualitative and longitudinal approaches bear promising techniques to collect meaningful data on return dynamics including an extended post-return period (see also paper 5.5). One empirical example of what such an approach reveals is the finding of ‘slow deportation’ developed in paper 5.2. Through a comparative longitudinal analysis of migrants’ post-return income trajectories after deportation and AVRR from Germany, I show how AVRR, though framed as voluntary and development-oriented, can over time resemble deportation in terms of disillusionment, social exclusion, and eroding agency. This convergence only becomes visible through extended temporal engagement with returned migrants. Methodologically following return experiences over longer periods of time thus enhances return regime research. Most current studies rely on shorter-term and/or one-off data collection. While these still capture a time-scale understanding – since return has already occurred – they lack the extended engagement necessary to reveal temporal complexities in the return regime, especially because time is so central in assumptions about reintegration and development effects. 77 Second, however, time-sensitive return research needs to go beyond the migrant level. We also have to know more about the ‘time politics’ (Cwerner 2004; Eule et el. 2019) of political and administrative return regime actors and their transnational complexities. Reintegration politics is part of these time politics, foreseeing and imprinting certain assumed temporalities on returned migrants that might not be possible or difficult to fulfil. But there is a multiplicity of other ‘time politics’ and temporal complexities in the return regime. Debates around return and reintegration within states as well as among populations are affected by and equally affect other political domains, such as international negotiations with Northern actors, or societal debates about state responsibilities for migrants and non-migrants. For example, the fast-paced temporalities of migration-related development programmes of the EUTF or the high pace of deportation operations as demanded by the EU do not synthesize with the overall slower transitional process of the Gambian political system, although its democratization initiation had served as the basis for the increased return and development cooperation. However, the (re-)establishment of democratic principles after autocratic rule, such as freedom of expression, citizen responsiveness or trust in democratic institutions, need longer than that, and are at the same time complicated by the return dynamics they enabled (Fresia 2014; Koser & van Hear 2003). Through such temporal studies towards the political level, we also need to consider the agencies of the political and administrative actors in the country of origin/return, and how their agencies are embedded in broader societal and political negotiations in their local context. In Europe, we repeatedly see increased efforts of European governments to return migrants to their countries of origin/return while simultaneously we recognise that these efforts are far less fruitful than anticipated. With new instruments such as the revised Schengen visa code that allows sanctions towards nationals of countries that show lacking return cooperation, it can be expected that geopolitically uneven negotiations around return further increase. This bears risks of conflictive negotiations, destabilizing state responsiveness towards their citizens in countries of origin/return and increasing repression of free speech if the matter of return becomes politically contested. In order to critically examine the consequences of such politics, studying the role of return politics in countries of origin/return contexts is an important counter-balancing act of policy-critical research. Taken together, these contributions challenge dominant logics in return-related research by foregrounding migrant and origin-state agency, uncovering the unequal temporalities at play, and exposing how return governance is embedded in contested knowledge production. 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Michelsen Institute. 100 B.V Interviews with Migrants in Germany Label Characterization Place Time Data collection format R22 potentially returning Baden Württemberg, Germany December 2020 interview R23 potentially returning Baden Württemberg, Germany December 2020 interview I02 migrant & activist Baden Württemberg, Germany May 2017 interview Mig01 potentially returning Baden Württemberg, Germany September 2019 interview Mig02 potentially returning Baden Württemberg, Germany September 2019 interview Mig03 potentially returning Baden Württemberg, Germany November 2019 interview Mig04 2 potentially returning Baden Württemberg, Germany November 2019 group interview B.VI Participant Observations Label characterization Place Time PO01 German administration ‘Gambia taskforce’ meeting Stuttgart, Germany December 2017 PO02 “Youth Against Irregular Migration” weekly meeting Greater Banjul Area, The Gambia February 2018 PO03 Homeless transit returnees Greater Banjul Area, The Gambia February 2018 PO04 YEP Roadmap Validation Workshop Greater Banjul Area, The Gambia February 2018 PO05 German administration ‘Gambia taskforce’ meeting Stuttgart, Germany November 2018 PO06 German administration Gambia AVRR Workshop Esslingen, Germany January 2019 PO07 German administration West Africa AVRR Workshop Ulm, Germany July 2019 101 APPENDIX C: EXEMPLARY QUESTION GUIDES These question guides serve as exemplary. Question guides were adapted to each interview context and interview wave. C.I Question Guide for Returned Migrants – Wave 1 Thank you very much for your willingness to participate in my research on return migration to the Gambia. I want to learn about experiences of Gambian migrants when they return and about the ways they think about political issues. For this, I will listen to your stories and your views and maybe ask some questions in between. So I will be more of a listener than of an interviewer. Do you have any questions regarding my work or what I want from you? (explain interview format) BLOCK 0 – Opener Guiding question / stimulus / prompt Start with a rather specific question depending on how I know the person (e.g. depending on who I got the contact from) or a very open question if I feel that this will get the person talking, e.g.: So, how have you been doing lately? Expected content Follow-up questions - most pressing issues, e.g. regarding family, housing, social, economic - reflection of the return itself - return in societal discussion (stigma/solidarity) - BLOCK 1 – In Germany Guiding question / stimulus / prompt Before we go more into detail about your life here, can you tell me about your situation in Germany before you returned? - Maybe you can tell me a bit about your life there, what you were doing over there. Expected content Follow-up questions - living situation (city, accommodation) - last asylum status - social life - job/income situation - support towards his family - role of option of return - support structures - German institutions & state support/force - Political activism/active positioning in Germany - How did you spend your time there? - Who did you spend it with? - And what about your legal status? How did it develop? - So what was the most important you did over there in Germany? - And who supported you to do/achieve that? How about German institutions? - What do you think about the rules and laws they have in Germany? - Do you think the German government is a good government? - How are they in implementing the rules and laws? Good for the people? - So all in all, did you feel supported or forced by the German laws? - Aren’t you also a bit angry about not being able to stay longer? Unfair? - Did you speak out your opinion openly about the German authorities somehow? - Why (not)? 102 BLOCK 2 – Returning Guiding question / stimulus / prompt So, why did you finally return? - Did you take a decision to do that? Expected content Follow-up questions - duration of stay - type of return (voluntary/involuntary) - family standpoints - decision-making influence factors: family, institutions, social network, individual situation - Who helped you to take the decision? - Did your parents or friends in the Gambia influence your decision? - Try? - Why not - the Germans? / - your Gambian friends? - How did other Gambians think about you returning? Why not? - So, what happened after you decided to return? - And what did you do to prepare the return? - Who helped you with the planning? - Were you offered more support to prepare your return? - What did the return advisors do? - help you? - And what did you think of that? - Was there anything that the German authorities could have done to make the return better for you? - And when you landed, what happened? - How was that? / Was that good? BLOCK 3 – Present Guiding question / stimulus / prompt And now you are back. Can you maybe tell me what were the most important things that happened in your life since then? Expected content Follow-up questions - time of return - perceived scope of agency - importance of different actors (political/social) - role of (political/other) support - Was coming back like you had imagined? - What is the best support that you have here? - And how has your family reacted to your return? - Had they been supportive of you taking the backway in the first place? - And are you trying to make some money? - How did you spend the reintegration funding? - And how about other people that have returned? How are they doing? - Did they face more or less problems than you do? - What do some people that have returned do differently than you? - What about deportees/voluntary returnees, how is their situation different? 103 BLOCK 4 – Future Guiding question / stimulus / prompt And what do you see to happen in your life in the near future? - What do you think will happen to your life in the upcoming months? Expected content Follow-up questions - future prospects - role of economic/ social/ political situation for decision-making - means to get ahead - role of (political) support for getting ahead - re-migrating as an option - political activism as potential means to shape own future - Is there something that you really want to achieve in the upcoming months? - And what are you doing to reach that? - which concrete steps? - And who or what supports you? - How did you use the reintegration money from the IOM so far? - Which other financial or organizational support did you have? - Which kind of support would you need? - What would you have done differently if you had known how things now developed? - And what about migrating again? Is it an option for you? BLOCK 5 – Politics Guiding question / stimulus / prompt I am interested in what you think about politics more generally. Which changes do you see in the Gambia with the new government? - When you compare the time before and after your journey, how is the Gambia different now from your perspective? Expected content Follow-up questions - perceived societal changes through political change - relevance of politics in life - political opinions - politics & return - national vs. international actors - perceived scope of political agency - And what can the government do to strengthen the Gambian people in your opinion? - Have you got the impression that the government serves their people better now because it is more democratic? - What do you think about trying to influence political decisions in the Gambia? - Who do you think can participate in politics? How? - What do returned migrants have to do with the government? - How could the situation for return migrants be improved? - What did you think of the protests against deportation? - And what about groups of backway returnees that formed associations, what do you think of that? - Do you think in Germany people can speak their mind on politics more openly than in the Gambia? - What do you see different about Germany now than before you took the backway? - Do you think that Germany should be responsible to support you now or the Gambia? 104 C.II Question Guide for Institutions Thank you very much for your willingness to participate in my research on return migration to the Gambia. As I have already informed you, I study return experiences of Gambian migrants in relation to the return conditions they face. For this, I interview both migrants and institutions that are involved in return and reintegration. Therefore, I am interested in the work of *institution* and the perspectives that you have received on return and reintegration through your work here. (explain question format) Option a (no co-expert): BLOCK 1 – Priorities Guiding question / stimulus / prompt Can you tell me about the prioritized issues are *institution* deals with at the moment? - regarding the Gambia? (institutions in Germany) - regarding migration? (non-focused institutions in The Gambia) - regarding the return of migrants to the Gambia? (specialized institutions in The Gambia) Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions - work priorities and role of Gambia/ return therein - perception of ‘returnee’ - work & challenges regarding migration/ return - need of management of migration/ return - Are there any further priorities? - Why is this particularly prioritized? - And what other aspects of return management are you involved in? - So which migrants does *institution’s* work affect/reach/consider? - Why does the programme/ intervention focus on these returnees? Option b (co-expert) BLOCK 1 – Priorities Guiding question / stimulus / prompt (Talk about recent event, e.g.:) When return started to become an issue in the Gambia in 2017, especially humanitarian returnees from Libya set the agenda of most people I spoke to. But recently, the numbers of return from Europe and especially Germany have increased steadily. Which effect has this had on your work priorities? Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions - work priorities - perception/differentiation of ‘returnees’ - challenges reg. return management - need for management of migration/ return - How has it affected the priorities of *institution*? - How did the challenges change since then? - And how has it influenced the role of *institution’s* work in comparison to other actors? - And what other aspects of return management are you involved in? - So which migrants does *institution’s* work affect/reach/consider? - Why does the support/programme/ intervention focus on these returnees? 105 BLOCK 2 – Own work Guiding question / stimulus / prompt 2) So, *institution* is XXX14. Can you tell me a bit more what you exactly and concretely do to fulfil that? Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions - work processes - networks (institutions & migrants) - Mission’s objectives - discrepancies planning – reality - Which concrete actions are you implementing that deal with the issue of return? - In which work areas are you performing most successfully at the moment? - What are the things that make your work most difficult? - Which overall developments that you do not have an influence on in your everyday work have great impact on your performance? BLOCK 3 – General Setup and networks Guiding question / stimulus / prompt 3) As you have already indicated/ As we know, there are numerous different actors involved in the complex processes of return politics and management. Let’s now maybe turn towards that institutional context. Can you point out the most important players in that field and what role they play for your work? Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions - perception of ‘who is who’ - cooperation and interaction - institution’s position in the system - responsibilities of different institutions - evaluation of other’s works - And are there any more? - And which are maybe some that are a bit less relevant/ have been more important in the past/ are trying to get involved? - Which institutions does *institution* most intensely cooperate with? - How does this cooperation look like concretely? //What do you do together? - With which German/ Gambian institutions do you communicate? About what? - How do you see the cooperation between domestic and international actors? - Do the others perform as good they should? - And which of the institutions are you less in touch with? Why? BLOCK 4 – Return realities Guiding question / stimulus / prompt 4) Now we have talked about return as a professional field. Turning towards the returnees themselves, how do you perceive their situation when they leave the airport? Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions 14 Institution-specific information that signals that I have been working on the issue, and that I understand the institution’s mandate. 106 - perception of post-return situation of migrants - perception of returnees - opinions about right to support - differentiation of returnees - Can you describe to me what happens to them right after returning and during reintegration? - Which different reintegration options exist? - So how do they get in touch with different institutions/ service providers? - How are the ones that have already returned doing so far? - What are the most important steps or interventions for them to reintegrate looking at a more long-term perspective? - What influences whether an individual reintegration goes well or doesn’t? - How important do you estimate is the access to services for returnees and their reintegration? - But one could also question why returnees should get specific institutional support whereas those who stayed face difficulties as well. What do you think about that? BLOCK 5 – Evaluation Guiding question / stimulus / prompt 5) Comparing the system in place and the reality of return, how successful do you assess the return management? Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions - perception overall management performance - perception own performance - judgement other actors/ comparing balance of influence - describing gaps - In which ways do the institutions not achieve what is necessary? - How, do you think, do the returnees get along with the support they are provided so far? - What would it need (most) to make return and reintegration (even) more successful? - Which changes would the institutional setup need to perform (even) better? - Or does it need some actors to step back in some way? - How do the returnees contribute to the current state of success/performance? BLOCK 6 – Future Guiding question / stimulus / prompt 6) Now looking ahead, what do you expect to happen in future regarding return from Europe/US? Expected content Maintaining questions Follow-up questions - assessment international migration politics - Which are the biggest challenges coming up in future regarding return? - What is the national government doing in order to deal with these issues? - And do you think they could handle it differently? - In how far is it the international actors’ responsibility also to deal with these challenges? - Are they aware of that at all? - How could *institution* react properly to this development? - Provocative/critical Q