Many migrants are forced to return to their country of origin against their own will, and these returns are often deceptively labelled as “voluntary” or “assisted voluntary.” But some people go because they genuinely want to return – despite having the option of staying well-integrated abroad. In my book, I investigate what happens when they decide to return to a post-conflict country – Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A systematic look at the evolution of the concept “sustainability,” of return and reintegration reveals a lack of either scholarly or policy-making consensus on what this concept means. While an absence of re-emigration and ensuring income sufficiency of the returnees characterised the earlier phases of how sustainability was conceptualized, the concept becomes fragmented with scholars developing additional criteria for measuring the sustainability of return and reintegration, and others questioning whether there could be one single definition of sustainability.To counter the ‘sedentary bias’ inherent in some definitions of sustainability, it became essential to re-introduce the element of voluntariness in migrant decision-making.Based on an inductive thematic analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with what I call 'decided returnees,' I explore how the nurturing of transnational commercial and professional ties with the former host state can affect the sustainability of economic livelihood on return to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the ICT sector (and other export-oriented industries). However, the paper also reveals that such transnational ties could hinder the sustainability of return in fields that are more place-bound and susceptible to greater political control, such as public employment in the education and health sectors.The policy discussion section of the paper looks at what sustainability of ‘decided’ return migration means from the perspectives of home and host states.

This open access book creates conceptual links between political emotions, citizenship, home and belonging. The book describes that, in the case of decided return and reintegration to a post-conflict society and a fragmented state, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, the returnees do not conceptualize the emotional dimension of their BiH citizenship as home and belonging as this citizenship does not make them feel safe and secure. Instead, “feeling at home” is found in family, place and time, while belonging is categorized as ethnic, religious, relational, landscape, linguistic, and economic. The emotional dimension of the home state citizenship is constituted through a wide spectrum of emotions, ranging from anger, frustration, fear, guilt, shame, disappointment, nostalgia, powerlessness, to patriotic love, pride, defiance, joy, happiness and hope. This book provides a valuable resource to students and scholars of migration and diaspora studies, as well as political scientists, human geographers and anthropologists.

Although “returns of retirement” have been recognized as a distinct category of return migration as early as the mid-1970s, and identified as lying on the intersection of two highly important phenomena: ageing and migration, “retirement return migration” has not yet received the full attention it deserves. To aid in filling this research gap, my paper looks at the case of retired guest-workers returning from Germany and other countries of the Global North to their native Serbia and Bosnia. My paper is based on content analysis of a museum exhibit entitled “Gastarbeiter stories: On the other side of the Pliva river,” collected and curated by staff at the “Museum of Yugoslavia” in Belgrade, Serbia and the “History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina” in Sarajevo, BiH. The analyzed data include 18 interviews with retired guestworkers, and various exhibit artefacts, such as their personal letters and photographs, pieces of autobiographic writing, school diplomas, snippets of interactions with German citizens, and copies of German pension certificates. The museum exhibit delivers a unique perspective on guest worker programs by outlining the grand historical narrative and infusing its “dream space” with a private glimpse into the lives of individual labor migrants and their families. The interviews and material objects generate knowledge about guest worker programs and retirement return migration by offering a personal lens to examine a global phenomenon.