Il coraggio dell’altrove e il coraggio del restare: retoriche, ambiguità e contraddizioni nei programmi AVRR dell’OIM e nei ritorni migranti a Vélingara - The courage to pursue the elsewhere and the courage to stay: rhetorics, ambiguities and contradictions in IOM’s AVRR programmes and unsuccessful migrant return trajectories in Vélingara

Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the southern Senegalese city of Vélingara examines the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programmes promoted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as an ostensibly replicable model of mobility management (modèle voyageur). These programmes function as propaganda mechanisms that discredit the image of the “irregular” migrant while simultaneously valorizing the local, community-rooted micro-entrepreneur. Central to this process is the “deportation twist”: AVRR interventions reframe forced return as a positive, even empowering experience. However, this rhetoric often obscures the persistence, upon return, of the very economic and social…