Assisted voluntary return : negotiating the politics of humanitarianism and security in migration management

This dissertation analyzes the political geographies of humanitarianism in Europe's Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programs for migrants. Promoted as a humanitarian policy of migration management, and often implemented by humanitarian institutions, AVR programs provide counseling, travel booking, and reintegration assistance for undocumented immigrants and appeals-rights-exhausted asylum-seekers to return from Europe to their country of origin. AVR policies are typically framed as a humane, dignified, and voluntary alternative to deportation and, as such, have become increasingly enrolled in Europe's management of migration - particularly in the wake of the EU's 2015-2016 "migration crisis." This means that practitioners implementing AVR programs daily negotiate the realities of providing humanitarian assistance to migrants in a context that is increasingly securitized around governing migration through effective returns policies. Drawing from archival research and interviews with AVR practitioners at a range of organizations across Europe - NGOs, the International Organization for Migration, and state actors - who counsel migrants about the decision to leave Europe via AVR, my dissertation unpacks the spaces and politics of how AVR is implemented at this intersection of care and control. This dissertation contributes a critical geographical analysis of humanitarianism's paradoxical politics by deploying AVR as a lens onto how humanitarian assistance is enrolled in Europe's management of migration. The dissertation's empirical chapters investigate AVR's history, practices, discourses, and politics as a policy implemented at the nexus of state security motivations and humanitarian assistance for migrants. My study contributes an understanding of migration management as biopolitical governmentality, arguing that humanitarianism paradoxically becomes a spatially extended form of governance over migration through AVR. Inspired by feminist geopolitics, I analyze how this policy is implemented through a network of institutions that are embodied by individual practitioners. Drawing on interviews with these practitioners, I bring care ethics analysis into conversation with the politics of humanitarianism and the control of people's movement through migration management. In these ways, my dissertation contributes a spatial and political analysis of how humanitarian practitioners negotiate providing care for migrants in an uncaring, securitized political context.