Reintegration Governance in Serbia

The Reintegrate Project aims to understand how reintegration is governed and how reintegration governance influences returnees’ experiences. Many people do not have the right to stay in countries of migration and return to their countries of origin through different types of programs and policies; this return can be chosen, or it can be forced.
Little is known about how different countries govern the process of reintegration once people return and how return migrants experience their return and reintegration process. This study presents stakeholders’ perspectives, alongside return migrants’ experiences of return and reintegration in a comparative analysis across four case studies of Nepal, Nigeria, Serbia, and the Philippines. Reintegration is defined in this study as “the process in which return migrants are supported in maintaining their cultural and social identities by the host society and the whole population acquires equal civil, social, political, human, and cultural rights” (Kuschminder, 2017, p.43).
This definition considers various domains of reintegration and places emphasis on the duality of responsibility between both returnees and the receiving society in facilitating reintegration. A reintegration policy is defined “as instruments intended to address the social, economic, and political needs of returnees to facilitate their reintegration
into society” (Kuschminder and Saguin, 2025). Reintegration policies are widely considered as implemented by different actors, reflecting different intentions and designs,
and showing trade‑offs between migrant protection and migration management objectives. Reintegration governance refers to “the policies, practices, and institutions involved in the design, delivery, funding, implementation, and/or evaluation of processes to manage or support the returnees’ transition into the household, community, and broader society of their country of origin” (Kuschminder, 2024). Reintegration governance thus includes multiple actors and their associated policies to implement reintegration