Back to the fold? Women, return migration, and patriarchal governance in MENA

This study investigates how women who return from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa navigate and negotiate their identities, rights, and social roles in highly neopatriarchal contexts, especially during a period of increasing female returns and persistent gender inequalities. It seeks to uncover the strategies by which returnee women confront ‘re-domestication’ imposed by family, state, and religious institutions and assert dual performances of conformity and subversion. Employing qualitative secondary data and comparative Critical Discourse Analysis, the research analyzes NGO reports, migration assessments, ethnographic case studies, and digital diaspora media from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Gulf states. Findings highlight a paradox: while institutional reintegration programs reinforce patriarchal structures, returnees leverage transnational social remittances to access entrepreneurial and activist opportunities, creating spaces for legal information and psychosocial support. Through a tripartite framework of neopatriarchy as conceived by Sharabi, feminist constructivism, and social remittances by Levitt, this paper challenges the paradigms of return migration that are based on economics alone and brings further scholarship on gender. This research reconceptualizes reintegration as an engaged process of negotiation that is also sensitized to gender and may give practical ways forward for policies and practices that are more just.