‘It’s Like a Dog Barking.’ Non-Performativity as Anticipatory Politics: EU Migration Diplomacy on Refugee Return from Lebanon to Syria

Before the spectacular fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, while both Lebanese and EUropean political actors found refugee return either unfeasible or undesirable, their diplomatic engagement on durable solutions for Syrian displacement was nevertheless dominated by return narratives. This paper unpacks this central paradox in return migration diplomacy and theorizes it through the lens of non-performativity. Building on over hundred in-depth interviews and extensive document analysis, it argues that exactly because other durable solutions were taboo – Lebanon categorically refuses integration and EUrope de facto impedes resettlement – return narratives were leveraged to maintain a status quo of containment and rentierism through three core mechanisms: (i) flaunting policy excess; (ii) cultivating capacity deficits; and (iii) nurturing copy-paste diplomacy. Analyzing Lebanese and EUropean return migration diplomacy as a form of non-performativity makes two crucial contributions to extant literature. Theoretically, it extends the notion of migration diplomacy beyond its transactionalist-rationalist outlook by conceptualizing the performative and ritualistic dimensions of the transnational politics of refugee return. Empirically, revealing the path dependencies generated in the non-performativity of past migration diplomacy sheds important new light on current and future refugee return politics regarding the post-Assad Syria.