A Humanitarian and Imperial Return: New Themes of Return in the Repatriation of African Migrants from Niger

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.