If I cannot go back home, who am I? Syrian Refugees and the Limits of International Return Programs
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Voluntary return remains the preferred durable solution in international refugee policy—and one of its most persistent failures. Return programs consistently underperform, yet scholarship and policy cannot explain why, under identical conditions, some refugees return while others do not. Bermudez and researchers argue they have focused on the wrong variables. This study presents findings from the first real-time longitudinal study of return decision-making during a major political transition. When the Assad regime fell in December 2024, return became suddenly possible for over six million displaced Syrians. Over the following year, Bermudez and researchers conducted more than 60 in-depth interviews with Syrian women in Turkey and returnees in Syria, tracking how decisions emerged, evolved, and held or unraveled. Their findings invite us to reconceptualize return. It is not a decision point but a process, one that defines not only the future but the self, shaped less by security, economics, or logistics than by what remains culturally permissible. Bermudez and researchers theorize this as the sense-making burden: the interpretive labour through which refugees construct return as imaginable or impossible within frameworks of individual and collective identity. This research advances both policy and scholarship across refugee studies, sociology, and gender studies by revealing what traditional indicators miss: how refugees themselves determine what makes return possible.
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