How repatriates forge social change in the metropole: a cross-cultural migration perspective

Abstract

If we want to understand how the trauma experienced by repatriates influenced the country where they settled after decolonization, we should not only focus on the way these migrants and their descendants were able to mobilize their material and cultural-political claims, but also pay attention to their infrastructural role within the state bureaucracy, especially with respect to migration and integration. This paper shows that, the relation between France and Algeria is an extremely revealing case, because here we see the confluence of returning organizational migrants who originated from the metropole, and labour migrants with roots in the former colony. This article uses the Algerian migration to France as an example, drawing attention to the largely hidden infrastructural-bureaucratic role of repatriating civil servants and the military, and as such serves as an supplement to the public trauma drama of political representatives of associations of repatriates.