A Humanitarian and Imperial Return

New Themes of Return in the Repatriation of African Migrants from Niger

Bibliographic Data

ID2230286
AuthorsAmpson Hagan (0000-0001-8145-5645, University of Maryland, College Park, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume32
Issue2
Pages97-108
Publication date2024-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransforming Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1051-0559 • E-ISSN: 1548-7466
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/731814
OpenAlexW4403680109
LanguageEN
References cited50

The conceptual and discursive instrumentalization of migrant return reflects the symbolic power of imperial and racial politics of civil society (of which Africans are absent). Return, as a paradigm through which nations pursue the reorganization of internal demographics and solve demographic anxieties, also operates on moral and register, which are differentially animated by European (white) and Black African sentiments and attitudes toward Black African migration. This article focuses on return as violence in three ways within the humanitarian-migration control nexus in which it operates to remove Black Africans from irregular pathways to Europe. First, it argues that migrant return is an imperial tool that governments and international nongovernmental organizations like the International Organization for Migration use to physically move Black Africans across states within Africa through various bureaucratic and political means. Second, it argues that return can hide its everyday violence behind moments of the spectacular and promotes this anti-Black violence as the contingent, rather than the ontological, status of Black peoples. Third, it engages the ways that return represents a segregative biopolitics that focuses on a moralized resituating of peoples along racial-geographic imaginaries

Ethnology · Niger delta · Political science · Repatriation · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Engineering · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics

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