Work Package 2: Contribution to D9.5
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This literature review serves to map the position of and approach to enforced return from the perspective of various actors operating in Europe’s deportation regime. We use enforced return as an
umbrella term that includes assisted and incentivized “voluntary” return as well as forced removals from nation state’s territories.1 While at the beginning of the twentieth century, the enforced return of unlawfully residing residents was commonly considered unacceptable, it became ‘utterly banal’ at the end of the same century (De Genova & Peutz 2010). Ever since, social scientists have documented the rise of what Gibney (2008) calls “the deportation state”, showing that enforced return became an increasingly normalized tool for states in their efforts to curb and control migration. Despite its widespread usage, significant empirical evidence points to the existence of a “deportation gap” (ibid): a substantial mismatch between the number of removal orders issued and those actually enforced. In their attempts to close this purported gap, states in the Global North therefore take a myriad of measures to increase enforced returns. These include persuading illegalized migrants to return “voluntarily” (Cleton & Chauvin 2020) through so-called Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programs, which are operated by international organizations like the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but also increasing their resources and capacity to deport (Leerkes & van Houte 2020) and by seeking to elicit the cooperation of migrants’ countries of citizenship through signing EU-wide and bilateral readmission agreements and other (non-binding) arrangements (Cassarino 2010). These readmission agreements are more-or-less formal appointments made in bilateral or multilateral settings, that regulate this process of enforced return (Trauner 2018).
Authors: Rausis, Frowin, University of Geneva (UNIGE), Cleton, Laura, University of Rotterdam (EUR), & Lavenex, Sandra, University of Geneva (UNIGE)