Paper short abstract:

Libya's war in 2011 caused the return to Niger of thousands migrants from Niamey who had lived in the Mediterranean country for years. They reformulated their social role within new values and strategies, due to their urban condition and their migrant experience. They are the Niameyzé migrants.

Paper long abstract:

During decades, Gaddafi's Libya was like Eldorado for thousands of economic migrants from a fragile country as Niger. After different migration flows from rural nigeriens areas, people from Niamey join the way to Libya during the 2000s. They did it with a different project, more "individualist" and conceived in a "capitalist" way. Libya's war caused their return in vulnerable conditions, as well as circular rural movements. However, the migrants from the capital assumed the failure of their migration plan with certain privileged circumstances, as a result of their urban feature and experience in Libyan cities. This new collective worked as a workforce in multinationals and public companies during their life in Gadafi's country. It is a flow with specific characteristics and it qualifies itself as Niameyzé, which refers to "authentic" citizens from Niamey. They use their experience in Libya and their perfomative "cosmopolitism" to try to obtain the "development rent", subventions from international cooperation. This paper wants to approach to this forced return of Niameyzé, trying to treat the reconfiguration of this urban collective identity used to stratify from rural migrants. It will explain how the migration to Libya has impacted to the urban imaginarie through the main important sociable masculine space in Niger, the fada. Our fieldwork has developed in these originally urban sites, related to globalized culture, where returned migrants talk about their residence in Libya and express their emic notion of their distinction as a urban migrant.