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Bjarnesen, J. 2013. Diaspora at Home? Wartime Mobilities in the Burkina Faso-Côte d’Ivoire Transnational Space. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 53. 279 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-554-8666-2.

In the period 1999-2007, more than half a million Burkinabe returned to Burkina Faso due to the persecution of immigrant labourers in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Ultranationalist debates about the criteria for Ivorian citizenship had intensified during the 1990s and led to the scapegoating of immigrants in a political rhetoric centred on notions of autochthony and xenophobia. Having been actively encouraged to immigrate by the Ivorian state for generations, Burkinabe migrant labourers were now forced to leave their homes and livelihoods behind and return to a country they had left in their youth or, as second-generation immigrants in Côte d’Ivoire, had never seen.