Challenging the official discourse on return policies: The relevance of a sociological approach in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

Favoring the return of refugees and of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to their pre-war homes is one of the cornerstones of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreements which put an end to the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The policy's objective was to reverse the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by warring parties, and to allow individuals and families to restart their lives as soon as possible (a common assumption being that refugees are in a time and psychological limbo). Based on ethnographic data collected over four years in the post-war period, I will show that return is a dynamic and multi-directional process, with complex individual and collective parameters. The decision to return is neither uniform nor universal; it is a personal response to fear, trauma, experience in exile or in displacement, and one's ability to adjust to a post-war environment with new constraints. In this perspective, my purpose in this article is to underscore how qualitative research methods allow the emergence of a social reality largely downplayed (or ignored) by political and institutional actors.