Rethinking Gender and Return: Mapping patterns and gaps in literature on gender and coerced returns - Concept note

This concept note maps conceptual, methodological, and empirical gaps in the literature on gender and return migration, with a specific focus on state-induced and coerced forms of return, including assisted return and deportation. Drawing on a purposeful literature review of 49 scientific studies published since 2010, the paper systematically examines how gender is conceptualized, operationalized, and mobilized across different strands of research. Using a structured analytical grid, the review assesses regional and thematic foci, methodological approaches, reflected perspectives, phases of return, and underlying gender frameworks. The findings reveal pronounced fragmentation in the literature. Research on assisted return and reintegration often relies on place-based and binary understandings of gender, emphasizing culturally rooted constraints and individual-level outcomes, particularly for women. In contrast, the studies on bordering, detention, and return governance conceptualize gender as enacted and ascribed within racialized and gendered regimes of mobility control, offering more nuanced insights into power relations but rarely extending into post-return analysis. Across both strands, significant gaps persist, including limited empirical research on return enforcement practices, a lack of longitudinal and comparative studies, underdeveloped intersectional analyses, and the dominance of receiving-state perspectives. Quantitative and gender-responsive data remain scarce, while reflexivity regarding researcher positionality is seldom addressed. The paper argues that these gaps reflect deeper tensions between migration management objectives and gender-responsiveness in return governance. It concludes by calling for integrated, intersectional, and reflexive research designs that link enforcement, return, and reintegration processes, and that more systematically account for care relations, agency, and structural inequalities.