Large-scale migration creates enormous pressure on the communities to which migrants head, whether they are camps that must temporarily accommodate refugees or the home communities to which people return after conflicts or disasters have ended. An estimated 2,000,000 people have returned to southern Sudan since the 2005 peace accord between the northern and southern parts of that nation. These returnees are the objects of numerable political and policy interventions on their behalf, and enormous energy has been expended in efforts to track, count, and monitor the returns process. Despite these efforts, very little ethnographic data exists regarding how their return is experienced on the ground. The ongoing return migration to southern Sudan presents a compelling opportunity to examine the processes through which local belonging is brought into a more politicized arena through its relation to the question of independence. By focusing on the daily practices of living, this doctoral dissertation research project will examine how high-volume return migration transforms the socio-spatial organization of local places in and around Bor, a town in the eastern state of Jonglei. The doctoral student will collect in-depth qualitative data through a variety of methods in order to explore the ways in which memory is mobilized to make claims to and about local places. She will seek to identify the micro-scale practices through which meaning is mapped to places by those who stayed and by return migrants; and she will document the way in which return migrants figure in the political project of securing an independent state for the southern Sudanese nation. By combining archival research, extended interviews, and participant observation, the student will provide data about returns across registers, including the technical register of policy documents, the register of self-representation, and the register of daily, lived practice. It is expected that return migrants and those who stayed make use of memories in distinct but malleable and fluid ways to delineate boundaries of interiority and exteriority. Furthermore, the investigator expects the making of such boundaries to have profound material and political effects that will play a critical role in post-conflict southern Sudan.
The research aims to theorize the role of spatial and scalar processes in the construction of an emergent southern Sudanese nation. It also will analyze the spatial characteristics of the post-conflict political environment in a southern Sudanese town by focusing on the relationship between memory experience, contested daily practices, and particular places. The project is expected to help fill a gap in existing research on repatriation by including perspectives of key population groups, such as return migrants, internally displaced people, and those who remained in place during the conflict, all of whose lives are deeply affected by return migration movements. By conducting research as return migrations occur, the project will help to capture the critical early stages of return, which have been less studied in the literature. It will provide new insights regarding the processes through which spatial practices of co-inhabitance coalesce, and how belonging comes to be defined through them. This ethnographic study of the initial impact of high volume return migration on receiving communities also will provide critical qualitative data about problems encountered with the process and point to ways to avoid exacerbating tensions in future repatriation and return efforts. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
