Return Workshop: An idea, practice, and contested horizon

Return as Untimely Possibility

Day one of the workshop will begin at 5:30pm in the DLT. The discussant will be Dina Matar (SOAS). Talks:

• 'Wayward Returns: Temporary Refugees, (In) Visible Border Crossers, and Exceptional Citizens on the Turkish-Syrian Border', Özge Biner and Zerrin Özlem Biner, SOAS and College de France
• '"We don't return, we arrive."  Staying, returning and arriving in Palestine', Ruba Salih, Università di Bologna 
• 'Post deportation?', Shahram Khosravi, Stockholm University

Return as a Site of Intervention

The first session of day two is at 1:00pm at the SOAS Bar. Talks:

• 'Temporalities of Return: Between Deferred and Imposed Exile', Dana Erekat, Save the Children Jordan. 
• '“From every river to every sea”. Return and the decolonization of laws and borders', Enrica Rigo, Università Roma 3
• Title tbc., Laura Hammond, SOAS
• Title tbc., Camilo Perez-Bustillo (Instituto Fronterizo Esperanza El Paso)
• 'Beyond the "Borders of Berlin"? West African perspectives on German immigration enforcement', Aino Korvensyrjä, Migration Mobilities Bristol.

Long Table: A Discussion

The Long Table will take place at 5:00pm at the SOAS Bar.

This is a participatory format where speakers and audience gather to reflect on key themes, acknowledging the tensions of private exchange and public engagement while celebrating collective knowledge-making.

"We don't return, we arrive."  Staying, returning and arriving in Palestine

In this talk, I start from the painful, yet urgent, question of what horizons can be conceived at a time of genocidal violence, when the very materiality of Palestinian life-worlds and existence are eroded day by day. I start from David Scott's reflections on the relationship between experience and expectation. Rather than reflecting, as we conventionally do, on the ways in which the past informs the present, Scott asks: how does the present that we inhabit affect the ways in which the past is told and what hopes and expectations for the future are forged? 

Against this background I reflect on returns and arrivals, as well as 'continuous presence', accounting for what these mean for Palestinians ethnically cleansed nearly 80 years ago, and for their offspring including the Palestinians in and of Gaza who returned 'home' to the rubble and destruction of their refugee camps, following the short lived ceasefire in February 2025. What meanings and visions are return and arrival imbued with? What political horizons do they sustain? 

I propose the intertwined concepts of home, indigeneity and return as prisms that together articulate potential futures where Palestinians are neither colonised nor natives and where indigeneity conjures ideas and visions of radical justice, beyond nativism and beyond liberal rights and colonial borders. I want to suggest that Palestinian indigeneity, which the politics of return stands for, is not a nostalgic claim to an ancestral home and land. Life in displacement has reanimated political cultures and visions that imbued return with active processes of self-making and home remaking which constitute a powerful tapestry of what liberation could look like.

Biography

Ruba Salih is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna. Before joining Bologna in 2022, she was a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London.  

Post-Deportation?

The notion of return is grounded in an idea that naturalises the nation-state system, built upon an uncritical link between individuals and territory. Forced return or deportation is seen as a way to restore the 'broken' connection between nativity and nationality, between biological life and political belonging. Experiences of deportation often reveal a spatial and temporal stretching of abandonment. The socio-political conditions of post-deportation generate their own temporality. For many, particularly long-term residents, life after deportation is experienced as a form of exile. It underscores how deportees experience life as fragmented, interrupted, and scattered, much like exile itself: a rupture in the relationship between time and place. In this talk, I will present my research on post-deportation to Afghanistan.

Biography

Shahram Khosravi is professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University. His research interests include anthropology of Iran, forced displacement, border studies, and temporality. Khosravi is the author of several books, including: Young and Defiant in Tehran (2008); The Illegal Traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders, (2010); Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, (2017); After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, Palgrave (2017, edited volume); Waiting. A project in Conversation (2021, edited volume), Seeing Like a Smuggler (2022, edited volume), and The Gaze of the X-ray: An Archive of Violence (2024, edited volume). He also started Critical Border Studies, a network for scholars, artists and activists to interact.

Temporalities of Return: Between Deferred and Imposed Exile

In Jordan, the idea of ‘return’ carries different weights. The recent fall of the Assad regime and the ongoing war on Gaza have made it even more evident that the ‘right of return’ is not the same for all refugees—it is politicized and deeply contested. For Palestinians, return is a recognised right under international law, enshrined in UNGA Resolution 194, yet endlessly deferred. It remains central to identity and politics across generations, while in practice it has become a terrain where states and international actors regulate mobility and belonging. 

For Syrians, return is less a right and more a policy horizon, pushed forward even as conditions remain unsafe. Both cases remind us that return is not simply about going home—it is about how states manage rights, identity, and futures. Seen together, Jordan becomes a living record of how return can be both a promise and a threat, shaping refugeehood and citizenship not as endpoints, but as ongoing struggles.

Biography

Dana Erekat is a Palestinian American architect, planner, and development practitioner with experience across international organizations, NGOs, and the public and private sectors in the Middle East and the US. From 2013–2016, she served as Head of Aid Management and Coordination/Advisor to the Minister at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning, where she led the technical committee for the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction Plan.

She is the author of several publications and photography series focused on planning practices. She has a BA in architecture from UC Berkeley and a Masters in City Planning from MIT.

“From every river to every sea”. Return and the decolonization of laws and borders 

The presentation discusses the multiple asymmetrical lines that intersect in the discourse on return. Similar to crossing borders, returning is an asymmetrical act that depends not only on the side from which it is viewed. Different aspects of this asymmetry emerge when we take into consideration the time involved, as well as the power relations engaged in the process of returning.

The presentations aims to explore the centrality of return for the decolonisation of the laws of borders.

Biography

Enrica Rigo earned a PhD in Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Theory at University of Naples and she was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute of Florence. Her research themes include: citizenship, multiculturalism, European studies, human rights and theories of justice. She is currently Senior Researcher in Philosophy of Law at the Law faculty of the University of Roma Tre.

Her teaching and research duties include: Adjunct Professor of the Legal Clinic Course on Migration and Citizenship; Adjunct Professor of Human Rights; Coordinator of the project Laboratory of Theory and Practice of Rights, funded by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Charlemagne Foundation. She has acted in several campaigns for the improvement of the rights of migrants.

Beyond the ‘Borders of Berlin’? West African perspectives on German immigration enforcement

The EU frames deportation as ‘return’—a technical, logistical process aligned with international law and the global nation-state order. Drawing on ethnographic research and activism with West Africans resisting deportation in the German asylum system after 2015, this presentation examines deportation as a transnational field of struggle, racialised dispossession, and counterinsurgency. 

The colonial origins and contemporary extractivist and imperialist functions of nation-state borders are particularly evident in the relationship between West Africa and Western Europe. What insights do these marginalised struggles against dispossession at the ‘heart of Europe’ offer for forging social relations and organising beyond borders and deportation?

Biography

Aino Korvensyrjä is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Helsinki. She is currently working on a book about deportation and migrant struggles in Germany. Aino collaborates with others to document and organise against deportation, borders, criminalisation, and policing.