What happens to a refugee when the regime they fled is gone?
The fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 seems, at first glance, to transform the story of the millions of Syrians who fled to Europe. The political reason for their displacement has changed, and more than three million displaced Syrians have reportedly returned. Yet this week’s readings make clear that the end of Assad’s rule does not produce an uncomplicated “return home.”
Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey emphasizes the extraordinary risks Syrians and other refugees took to reach Europe in the first place. They crossed seas in overcrowded boats because remaining home had become unbearable or dangerous. It set in motion years of adaptation. Refugees found employment, learned languages, built friendships, raised children, established professional identities, and became part of communities that had initially been imagined as temporary places of refuge. That history has been put in motion when European governments begin discussing whether Syrians should now go back. Return is not simply the reversal of migration. People have spent years establishing careers, relationships, communities, and identities elsewhere.
The reporting on Syrian doctors in Germany complicates the idea that refugees are people waiting to go home. Some Syrians have become part of German society while also contributing skills that Germany needs. Their presence and stories are about labor, citizenship, and belonging. At the same time, the readings about European attempts to encourage return reveal the political pressure placed on Syrians after Assad’s fall. A refugee can be welcomed when fleeing a dictatorship and then become politically inconvenient once that dictatorship disappears. Should political reasons supersede the societal reasons for refugees to stay?
Loubna Mrie’s Defiance adds another layer to this question. Her experience of Syria shows that “home” itself is complicated by political violence, identity, and memory. Returning to a country after years of displacement is therefore not necessarily a return to the place one remembers. The physical landscape may be familiar while the political and social meaning of home has fundamentally evolved.
What struck me most is how easily “the right to return” can become “the expectation to return.” Those are not the same thing. A person may finally have the possibility of returning without actually wanting to, or being able to, rebuild the life they had before. The end of a regime can remove one reason for displacement without erasing the consequences of displacement. As such, when governments begin to decide how populations should en route on their way home, it raises questions of whether return is possible given how embedded into the societal fabric refugees become in host countries. In this way, the host country, could or is in fact, become “home.”
That raises an uncomfortable question about who gets to define home. Is home the place where someone was born? The place they fled? The place where their family remains? Or the place where they have spent the last decade building a life?
Altogether, the stories seem less like a journey with a clear endpoint than the continued evolution of the question: after surviving exile, who gets to decide what home means?
