Violence Makes Some Refugees Want to Return Home

UNHCR promotes voluntary repatriation as the preferred solution to refugee crises, but refugees' preferences about return vary widely and are poorly understood.

🧭 What This Paper Asks

This research examines which refugees prefer to go home and why, proposing that return preferences arise from a trade-off between ties to origin and ties to host communities and from how wartime violence shapes refugees' sense of competency.

🧠 How Return Preferences Are Thought To Form

• Refugees develop feelings of being anchored to either their country of origin or their host country based on lived experiences before displacement and experiences after arrival. These attachments or detachments shape willingness to return.
• Firsthand exposure to wartime traumas can produce a sense of competency or self-efficacy for some refugees, which increases the appeal of returning to rebuild or reclaim life at home.

📊 Survey of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon

• Relationships between anchoring, trauma exposure, and return preferences are tested using survey data collected from Syrian refugees hosted in Lebanon.
• The analysis links measures of violence exposure, attachment/detachment to Syria, attachment to Lebanon, and stated preference for return.

🔑 Key Findings

• Refugees who experienced violence during the war are more likely to report attachment to Syria and are the most likely group to prefer returning.
• Refugees who have become detached from Syria or who have developed attachments to Lebanon are less likely to prefer return.
• The trauma-to-competency pathway operates for some refugees: firsthand exposure to wartime traumas is associated with greater self-efficacy and a higher likelihood of preferring return for a subset of respondents.

🚨 Why It Matters

These results show that repatriation preferences are not uniform: past violence and the balance of attachments between origin and host influence decisions about return. Policymakers and humanitarian agencies should account for both anchoring dynamics and the complex effects of trauma when designing durable-solution policies and reintegration assistance.