Internal Deportation

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of internal deportation as a form of intra-state expulsion of citizens to their ‘spaces of origin’. Drawing on nine years of multi-sited, participatory, ethnographic, and feminist research in Nepal, I examine how multiple state and non-state organisations forcibly return women migrating for sex and domestic work to their spaces of origin, which are often structured by the hierarchies of gender, class, caste, and indigeneity. I demonstrate how internal deportation seeks to immobilise Nepali citizens within the existing hierarchies that they have sought to escape through their migration projects. The article contributes to deportation studies by demonstrating that deportability is a condition which operates within the spaces of origin for some citizens, continues in the host countries where they become 'immigrants', and persists upon their return to their spaces of origin after deportation.