For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

This chapter outlines the archetypical framing contest found in many conflicts: that of terrorist versus revolutionary. While this contest is hardly novel, the ways in which combatants navigate these contests and their corresponding identities, and how such contests affect disengagement decisions and reintegration experiences, is not well understood. This chapter starts by going back to Mari, the FARC loyalist who introduced the book. Mari discusses her anger around how women have been framed by the government – as prostitutes, bad mothers, and manipulated victims. She and many other FARC combatants claim that these stories are made up by government informants and infiltrators, weaving a picture in which any woman who claims they were abused in FARC ranks is painted as a lying traitor.

This chapter provides an overview of the complex and continuously evolving disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs in Colombia. Colombia has been experimenting with DDR for decades in an attempt to create a “post-conflict” environment amid ongoing armed conflict. As deserters are pressured to provide key intelligence in exchange for benefits, these programs are central to the government’s strategic framing that discredits guerrilla ideologies. In the early 2000s, the Colombian government partnered with a high-end marketing firm to entice guerrillas to leave their groups, with glossy promises of protection, income, and reunion with family members. However, most of these promises are patently false and leave many ex-combatants at risk of violent repercussions from their former groups and further disillusioned with the government. Starting with ad hoc individual demobilizations, to the more formalized process of demobilizing the AUC paramilitaries in 2003–2006, to the expansion of programs for deserters and finally, to the collective demobilization of the FARC in 2016, this chapter reviews the evolution and controversies around these various processes.

Chapter 5 articulates recommendations for responding to orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking. The chapter advocates for a comprehensive multi-sector framework that focuses on both anti-trafficking and child protection mechanisms to combat orphanage trafficking using the three pillars for addressing human trafficking that are found in the Trafficking Protocol: prosecution, prevention and protection. Using this framework, the chapter recommends that countries respond to orphanage trafficking through criminalising and prosecuting orphanage trafficking as a form of child trafficking; preventing orphanage trafficking through addressing vulnerability, demand, corruption and complicity; and providing protection and assistance for child victims and survivors of orphanage trafficking focusing on identification, reintegration and access to remedies. The chapter advocates that a child-rights-based approach with a focus on prevention and protection, as opposed to just prosecution, must be at the centre of implementation of this framework.

Due to the historically bourgeoning prison population, how and when offenders re-enter the community has received increased attention. Parole, the discretionary release of an offender to serve the remainder of their sentence in the community, is seen by many as a solution to prison overcrowding concerns. Many jurisdictions call upon paroling authorities to review the prisoner’s case and to assign release conditions intended to assist in the re-entry process and mitigate public safety concerns for both mandatory and discretionary releases. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history and current status of parole. Other areas discussed include how risk assessment is incorporated, and separate from, parole decisions, the various methods by which parole decisions are made, commentary on the existing evidence of parole efficacy, discussions of the role of victims in the decision-making process, and considerations for various offender sub-populations.

Chapter 6 examines the Assistance to Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programme run by the IOM. I argue that the AVRR elusively expands the deportation capacity of countries of ‘transit’. I label the function played by aid as elusive because the AVRR is not coercively imposed by the IOM or European states on Moroccan authorities, countries of origin, or migrants. Moroccan authorities consider it a cheaper and more diplomatically acceptable alternative to deportations. Embassies of countries of origin see it as an economically advantageous way to outsource assistance to their citizens abroad in distress. Migrants themselves see it as a last resort opportunity in case things go wrong in Morocco – or so argue IOM officers.

In the context of China’s reintegration into the global market and thawing relations with the Soviet Union, wenshi ziliao participants revived the concept of “northern Manchuria” as a distinctive cultural space where Chinese entrepreneurial innovation flourished in a cosmopolitan environment alongside Russian influences. Editors used this memory-space, with its historical implications of regional distinctness apart from China proper and its associations with Russian colonialism, to promote regional claims to economic and cultural development that both conformed to and stood apart from nationalist narratives. Wenshi ziliao organizers re-conceived of the northeast borderland as a history of “liberation struggle” and “heroic resistance” that embodied China’s coming into being as a modern nation.Redefining marginality as centrality, they spoke to the historical concept of northern Manchuria as a unique geopolitical space outside of China proper while reclaiming it as a uniquely Chinese space at the forefront of the nationalist resistance story.This informed the ways in which local wenshi ziliao participants represented non-Han and non-Manchu ethnic minorities.Local historical investigators alternated between framing this ethnic diversity of non-Chinese traditions and histories in broad nationalist terms and incorporating it within narratives of local particularity.