ABSTRACT
This chapter considers life stories of migrants who return back to their country of origin by taking into consideration the specific case of some Ghanaians. The border control strategies put in place by Europe have had an important consequence on migrant routes and on the increase of corruption and exploitation of people on the move across African borders. Returnees can represent a powerful critical actor in discussing and re-shaping the idea of migration itself, its idiosyncrasies and the social image behind the “migration-success-remittances” model that is so diffuse in West Africa nowadays. The concept and the practice of failed return can be interesting and challenging points of analysis to provide a more complex and complete discourse on return migration. The contemporary condition of those migrants who had to cross borders to go back home highlight the contradictions that exist in between expectations and reality, shedding light on the construction of new social borders inside the society of origin.
