Haya Mortada

This ethnographic project explores a central paradox: why migrants return to the crisis-ridden city of Tripoli, Lebanon, to invest their life savings, often knowingly facing financial loss. I investigate return not as an economic calculation, but as a moral and relational project driven by obligations to kin and community. Through 16 months of fieldwork anchored in returnee-run cafés, a real estate office, and a cryptocurrency store, I ask: How do moral economies shape this seemingly irrational return? How do locals’ social expectations condition returnees’ investments and belonging? And how does living through collapse inform practices of investing and managing the perpetual possibility of re-emigration? The project reframes return migration as an aspirational and privileged mobility, challenging the assumption that movement is directed toward stability or economic gain. By tracing returnees’ investment practices, I investigate how they shape social worlds and materially condition the flexibility of return. I advance understandings of crises by documenting how returnees build meaningful lives not through optimistic future-building, but through a pragmatic acceptance of loss and a continuous negotiation between rootedness and flight.