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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. For ease of writing, the concepts of return and repatriation are employed interchangeably. Similarly, we use the terms refugees or forcibly displaced persons to refer to people who left the country in pursuit of asylum abroad.
2. This special issue is the outcome of the two editors’ stay as visiting fellows in the research group on ‘Polycentric Governing’ at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Acknowledgements go to the Center for supporting this research as well as a two-day authors’ workshop in December 2020. Acknowledgements go as well to all discussants who provided constructive comments during the workshop, and to Derya Ozkul and Jan Aart Scholte for their feedback on the Special Issue.
3. Few examples include the 2015 European Agenda on Migration, the 2015 and 2017 Return Action plans, the 2018 proposal for Returns Directive and the 2020 New Pact on Asylum and Migration.
4. Irregular migration/migrant remains a contested concept. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) defines it as ‘movement that takes place outside the regulatory norms of the sending, transit and receiving country’ (IOM 2022). Migrants can fall into irregularity as laws and policies change as well as their legal status about entry, residence and employment change.
5. UNHCR, International Law of Voluntary Repatriation, https://www.unhcr.org/5ae079557.pdf, p.1.