| Summary/Abstract |
While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns. We build on the case of Lebanon, which hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide after receiving more than one million displaced Syrians in the wake of Syria’s 2011 war, and where the EU has made tremendous investments to help build ‘resilience’ in the face of displacement. Although the UN concludes that conditions for safe return to Syria are not in place, Syrian refugees in Lebanon are now facing increasing pressure to return to their country of origin. We show that the EU’s policy rhetoric and practice on returns in Lebanon has been defined by incongruities that cast a pall on its ability to contribute to rights-based returns. In rhetoric, the EU aligns itself with international principles on return in dignity and safety – without, however, explicating its own role in realising such principles. In practice, its resilience-building approach remains at odds with such framings because it leaves the question of how resilience-building interacts with negative push factors for return in the host country unaddressed. ‘Resilience’ then contributes to the formalisation of precarity that prompts refugees to return prematurely. It is, moreover, co-opted by Lebanese politicians who argue for rash returns while pointing at the destabilising effects of what they see as imposed integration. These contestations incentivise the EU to opt for non-engagement with actual situations of contested returns so as to maintain partnerships for externalisation.
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