Unfulfilled expectations for making a better life: Young Malian men coping with their adventures post deportation

This article gives insight to the unfulfilled expectations of young Malian men, who sought to make a better life through adventure on their way to Europe, but were forcefully returned home. By following their representations of life situations, their social and work environments, this text explores these realities as experienced in their daily lives and in actors' narrations. It further explores the trajectories of the young men in relation to work, mobility, and ideas of a better life, and analyzes to what extent their ideas and narrations contribute to the concepts of youth, migration, and work within the relevant literature. The key issue is that expectations for making a better life through migration remain unfulfilled as the actors - in most of the presented cases - never arrive to the originally desired places and cannot live out their aspirations. The following article shows how these young men cope with this situation and the subsequent consequences. For these men, the established idea of success through migration and thus also the hopes of contributing to family income does not become reality. On the contrary, these are thrown back into a potential "waithood" where they cannot gain the status and responsibilities of adulthood. The text highlights a case in the administrative circle Kita in the south of Mali, where emigration towards Europe has become increasingly aspired since the end of the 1990s. Data gathered in two villages show the spectrum of potential coping strategies for dealing with a forced return. I show that many aim to or talk about re-emigrating, but in the end stay, which may be a coping strategy itself. This finding is different from what post-deportation literature mentions as a common consequence of forced return re-emigration. While some may be held in a situation of "involuntary immobility", others positively cope with the presumed situation of failure and find ways to make a better life where they are

Intersectional Convivialities: Brazilian Black and Popular Feminists Debating the Justiça Reprodutiva Agenda and Allyship Framework

The concept of reproductive justice is currently receiving a lot of attention in transnational counter-hegemonic feminisms. The text explores how Black and popular feminism are adopting the concept currently in Brazil. In the first section, the text deals with implications for agenda setting and reflects the movements’ strong reference to necropolitical dimensions of reproductive relations. Three elements of agenda setting are explored: addressing structural inequality within “classical” reproductive health issues; the attention to anti-natalist strategies, such as a continuous policy of sterilisation; and experiences of motherhood/parenthood being stigmatised or attacked. In the second section, the text explores another level of meaning of reproductive justice, namely that of being a framework for intersectional feminist alliances. Therefore, it deals with how the movements negotiate different positionalities and the question of allyship within their everyday convivialities. The movements negotiate these organisational challenges by reflecting processes of collective repositioning in a complex way and referring to important concepts of contemporary anti-racist and social movements in Brazil, such as não lugar, aquilombamento, and bem-viver

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

The effects of the intra-African and European deportation regimes brought about since the European Union's externalization of its migration and development policy by transferring it to countries of sub-Saharan Africa remain largely understudied - especially their effects on people's everyday life after forced returns. Based on extensive field research, Susanne U. Schultz's book analyses the supposedly "failed" migration of Malian men, the social situations in which they find themselves following deportation, and the implications of their "failure" for their social environment and broader society. This important ethnographic study creates empirical knowledge on key issues in migration research, policy, and practice in the context of a charged debate

"Failed" Migratory Adventures? Malian Men Facing Conditions Post Deportation in Southern Mali

The effects of the intra-African and European deportation regimes brought about since the European Union's externalization of its migration and development policy by transferring it to countries of sub-Saharan Africa remain largely understudied - especially their effects on people's everyday life after forced returns. Based on extensive field research, this book analyses the supposedly "failed" migration of Malian men, the social situations in which they find themselves following deportation, and the implications of their "failure" for their social environment and broader society. This important ethnographic study creates empirical knowledge on key issues in migration research, policy, and practice in the context of a charged debate

»Failed« Migratory Adventures?

The effects of the intra-African and European deportation regimes brought about since the European Union's externalization of its migration and development policy by transferring it to countries of sub-Saharan Africa remain largely understudied - especially their effects on people's everyday life after forced returns. Based on extensive field research, Susanne U. Schultz's book analyses the supposedly "failed" migration of Malian men, the social situations in which they find themselves following deportation, and the implications of their "failure" for their social environment and broader society. This important ethnographic study creates empirical knowledge on key issues in migration research, policy, and practice in the context of a charged debate

Die Politik des Kinderkriegens: Zur Kritik demografischer Regierungsstrategien

Zu viel Bevölkerung oder zu wenig? Wer soll Kinder bekommen und wer vom Gebären abgehalten werden? Kinderkriegen ist eingebunden in mächtige Regierungsstrategien, die auf Körper und Bevölkerungen abzielen. Das malthusianische Denken geht noch weiter, indem es fast alle Krisen unserer Zeit zu Bevölkerungsproblemen umdeutet. Der Status quo von sozialer Ungleichheit, Rassismus und globaler Zerstörung bleibt dabei allerdings unberührt. Die Autorin seziert das demografische Denken und versammelt Analysen deutscher Kinderwunsch-, Familien- und Migrationspolitik. Dabei hinterfragt sie auch eine "demografisierte" Klimadebatte und kritisiert repressive globale Verhütungsprogramme

Familienpolitik und die „demografische Chance“: Zur postkatastrophistischen Phase einer neuen deutschen Bevölkerungspolitik

Since the reunification, and continuously established since 2002, we can observe a revival of demographic rationalities within German policies – after decades of abstinence from explicit population programs (at least within the Federal Republic), as reaction to cruel Nazi population policy. Demographic projections of the “aging” and “declining” of German population are since then the reference for selective pro-natalist programs. These family policy programs aim to increase the birth rate within academic and middle class sectors while excluding unemployed people from certain welfare services and reducing assistance for poor parents. At the same time, - and this is their public image – they are integrated within policies which tend to increase employment of women and which have accomplished a slight change towards a more liberal paradigm of the family and the role of women. The author analyses the current changes within demographic government programs considering a transition from a “catastrophic “to a “post-catastrophic” discourse. It does so, on the basis of an intersectional theory of the bio-political state – embedding the analysis of family policy within broader utilitarian strategies of administering national populations, also for example within migration policies. The article concludes with an appeal for a fundamental leftist, feminist and antiracist critique of demographic rationalities as part of a common critique of the nation state and continuous trends of economization of the political