Gambian Returnees as Producers of Knowledge on the Border Regime

• Applicant: Viola Castellano
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 499334771

“Gambian Returnees as Knowledge Producers on the Border Regime” focuses on the political subjectivity of Gambians who migrated or attempted to migrate in the last years in European countries and who became recipients of Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration programs (AVRR), a tool for migration management that is increasingly implemented and desired by EU countries and international organizations such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The research assumes that, as AVRR returnees have passed through the status of the “irregular migrant” en route to Europe, the one of the asylum seeker in Europe, and finally the one of the returnee to be empowered by international cooperation in the Gambia, they are key witnesses and actors in narrating the heterogenous practices and policies of the mobility regime and the global inequalities it reproduces. The research will investigate the reasons and contingencies for which Gambian asylum seekers decide to apply for voluntary return, what they expect from AVRR programs and the challenges they face in returning to the Gambia. It will focus on the experiences and visions of AVRR returnees as forms of knowledge on the mobility regime and explore how these knowledges contribute to re-crafting (post)colonial opinions, attitudes, desires, and imaginaries towards Europe. Conducting a multi-sited ethnography with Gambian AVRR candidates and recipients in Italy, Germany and The Gambia, the research will grasp the recent shift in global migration management towards policies of border externalization, repatriations, and international cooperation, as told, rationalized, and contextualized by the subjects of those very policies. In so doing, the innovative aim of the research is to explore the multiple and relational dimensions of return through a participative and reflexive methodology, which will result in an ethnography of AVRR returnees political subjectivity, and a collaborative, open access platform for knowledge production on the experience of the institutionalization of “irregular migration”, co-edited with AVRR returnees. Overall, the research aims to fill the gap in the perspectives of “voluntary returnees”, which have not yet been thoroughly investigated in the relevant literature, but which have very important implications for understanding how political and social issues in West African countries are affected by EU-driven policies and initiatives, and which potential future scenarios in terms of migration could be generated by these policies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants