Performing Repatriation? The Role of Refugee Aid in Shaping New Beginnings in Mauritania

Abstract

Academic work on transitional justice has tended to focus on the most obvious and institutionalized sites where ideas about justice and transition are discussed or contested, such as truth commissions or international tribunals. Yet, there are many other sites where such ideas are framed, circulated or challenged, including sites outside transitional countries. Drawing on the case of Mauritania, where the repatriation of refugees has played a highly symbolic role during the latest 'democratic' transition, this article explores the specific roles played by refugee aid and past experiences of refugee life in shaping the terms of new beginnings in this country. As places of intense politicization of memory and appropriation of transnational discourses on human rights violations and transitional justice, refugee camps enhance the construction of new imagined communities based on a feeling of victimhood and abnormality and the construction of hegemonic narratives over the 'just order' to be aspired to for the future. The article outlines how such hegemonic ideas on justice and transition are shaped by humanitarian actors and the refugee elite, while at the same time being contested by subaltern groups through the production of alternative accounts of past injustices and through mundane practices.

Considering Local Integration for Refugees in Indonesia

“…As Jacobsen points out, there is a misconception held by many that refugees who went through a local integration program will not return to their home countries. However, studies have shown a contrary result, since refugees tend to choose to repatriate as normalcy and stability return to their countries (see Bahar, Özgüzel, Hauptmann, & Rapoport, 2019;Fresia, 2014;Weima, 2017).…”

Return and Retreat in a Transnational World: Insights from Eritrea

“…(p. 482) When, or if, refugees do then decide to return home, much evidence points to the value of this being deliberative and incremental (Steputat, 2004). To minimize both the risk of returning to a country that has likely been negatively affected by conflict and economic devastation and the risk of losing one's foothold in the country of asylum, families may split, with certain members returning to the country of origin to reestablish political, personal, or professional ties for part or all of the year while other family members remain in exile (Al-Ali et al, 2001;Fresia, 2014;Muggeridge & Doná, 2006). "Revolving" return (Hansen, 2007) among these populations, whereby individuals continue to cycle between sites in exile and in the country of origin, can constitute a step towards "sustainable return" within a general pattern of continuing transnational movement (Steputat, 2004, p. 2).…”

“…After this came literature that challenged the exceptionalism that surrounds how return is conceptualized in refugee situations (cf. Fresia, 2014). Bakewell (2002), for example, suggests that the vocabulary of repatriation is loaded with assumptions about return and home that are premised on refugees approaching movement in much more definitive and unidirectional ways than other populations.…”