Reintegration strategies

Reintegration processes form a central component of returnees’ experiences. This chapter presents the ‘reintegration strategies’ framework for analysing and understanding returnees’ reintegration processes. The reintegration strategies framework presents four categories of return migrants: reintegrated, enclavists, traditionalists and vulnerable. These categories are determined across the dimensions of cultural maintenance, social networks, self-identification and access to rights, institutions and the labour market in the country of return. The reintegration strategies combine with the structural and cultural environment of return to shape the returnees’ reintegration process and the potential of the returnee to be able to contribute to processes of social change or development upon return. The reintegration strategies framework is useful in highlighting the heterogeneity of returnees, stressing the needs of vulnerable returnees and eliciting both the potential strengths as well as the limitations of return migrants’ capacities within migration and development debates.