Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of forced-return migrations on individual and community health in Dakar. The disruption of migration projects can critically alter experiences, perceptions, and relationships, undermining future prospects and deteriorating individual and social well-being.

Paper long abstract:

In Senegal, emigration is socially valued as a meaningful way to achieve success. However, increasingly restrictive European border policies contribute to making migration journeys more perilous and uncertain; therefore, unwilling, forced returns due to deportation or adverse events en route have become more frequent. Ethnographic research in the urban area of Dakar revealed numerous challenges for the subsistence and psychosocial readjustment of forced-return migrants: in a state characterized by liminality, their original project is ruined to a condition of marginalization, sense of failure, feelings of dishonor and shame. Relationships with origin and surrounding communities can be damaged by complex processes of stigmatization. Physical and psychosocial health are jeopardized, also for limited accessibility of available care services. At the same time, new forms of bottom-up communities based on solidarity and shared challanges can emerge. These findings are discussed through the theoretical lenses of bio- and necropower, stigma and idioms of distress, as the result of power unbalances that constrain the opportunities of young Senegalese migrants, expose them to structural violence, and ultimately yield embodied individual health experiences.