An Easy Game? Experiences of ‘Homecoming’ in the Post-Socialist Context of Croatia and the Czech Republic

2016

The obstacles that often accompany remigration, planned and imagined as a ‘homecoming’, are seldom the topic of investigation in migration studies. Returning is not always an ‘easy game’. To explore this aspect of remigration, this chapter intends to focus on narratives of return produced mainly by so-called co-ethnic migrants who moved back to Croatia and the Czech Republic during the past two decades of post-socialist transformation. The empirical base of the chapter draws on the experiences and struggles accompanying remigration, and of arrival and acceptance in the respective society as described by returnees in biographical interviews. Attention is given to everyday social interaction …