‘The State, Nation, Citizen: rethinking repatriation’ by Katy Long, the latest in the series of Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers, is now available online.
This paper offers a recontextualisation of the problems posed by the idea of repatriation within the structures of the liberal-democratic international community by providing a historical contextualisation for the political concepts underpinning repatriation. This demonstrates that the essential difficulty in understanding refugee repatriation as a “solution” to displacement is a result of the fundamental problems of attempting to reconcile a political philosophy of universal human rights with the principle of nation-state sovereignty. The paper then argues that post-1985 attempts to reconceptualise repatriation were fundamentally flawed not only because they were largely prompted by a narrowing of the political space for asylum and the need to find alternative practical solutions rather than any foundational approach, but because in reducing theory to practice, repatriation was depoliticised into “return”, reducing the likelihood of durable solutions based on citizenship and the remaking of state-citizen bonds which required an explicitly political context. Examining empirical evidence, in particular from the case of Guatemalan “organised and collective” return from January 1993, the paper makes clear that refugee groups are often highly-organised political communities, whose decision-making abilities have long-been recognised (particularly in studies of unassisted repatriation)8 but rarely encompassed within official pathways to return. It argues that as demonstrated in Guatemala, recognition of this more direct and politicised refugee engagement in displacement resolution offers an opportunity to strengthen both concepts of refugee dignity and the durability of return.
