The Geopolitics of Return Migration in the International System

Abstract

In an era marked by the twin rise of populist and pandemic politics, the world has witnessed a dizzying array of policy initiatives aiming at ensuring the quick return of refugees, rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants. This Special Issue was conceptualised at a time when countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US) and Denmark, previously portrayed as traditional countries of resettlement, have placed the returns (expels or deportation) of asylum seekers at the forefront of their politics of migration. Key regional migrant-receiving and refugee-hosting countries from Colombia, Kenya, Malaysia to Pakistan have lobbied for accelerated returns and deportations, decrying the strains that refugees and migrants pose on their infrastructures. In situations of protracted displacement, despite the United Nations Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) warning against perilous returns, firsthost states, including Lebanon, Turkey and Bangladesh, have implemented rash return initiatives, aligning their politics of return with their geostrategic interests in regional conflicts on the one hand, and decrying insufficient global solidarity on the other (Fakhoury and Stel 2022; Mencütek 2022). In this special issue, we unpack the geopolitics of returns in the international system, drawing attention to the diversity of actors, practices, and policies that shape return governance regimes. In line with the scholarly debate, we understand geopolitics as a multi-faceted concept (Ferretti 2021; Kelly 2019). In its classical sense, geopolitics refers to the array of actions and policies through which states and regions seek to yield influence by leveraging their location, resources and statecraft power. At the same time, as critical streams of thought have shown (Ferretti 2021; Hyndman 2012; Sharp 2011) geopolitics encompasses the very processes through which ordinary people including refugees and migrants recast power politics and geostrategic environments. They do so either by resisting state-centric practices, engaging with