Identity of Highly Educated Returnees in Serbia

Sa？etak The paper examines the data collected through interviews with 50 highly educated returnees from Serbia, carried out in 2017. The main objective was to understand the personal and group identities of Serbian citizens with an experience of migration. The authors applied two conceptual paradigms: first, a primordial one, presupposing that migrants fully preserve their national identity despite being exposed to different cultures, customs, and values at the destination. The second is a social constructionist one, which is further delineated into two main lines of thought: the one assumes that migrants maintain national identity as a ’hard core’, yet in a continuous process of remaking/recreation as a result of embracing transnational ties. The other which presupposes that migrants build hybrid identities in a permanent flux because they are not firmly grounded in any specific culture. The interpretation of results indicated that a vast majority of returnees have devised hybrid identities. This means that destination society and culture have significantly effected their identity but national roots have still been preserved. The latter is mirrored in their strong sense of belonging to the nation. This may be interpreted as a consequence of two main circumstances. It is hard to expect that national identity can remain unmodified when migrants enrol in educational institutions and bond with scholars all over the world. Besides, the very fact of having maintained national identity made them willing to return and contribute to homeland development, despite Serbia’s lagging behind the social and economic developments of countries they had been living in. The results also revealed that the interviewees did not perceive any major difference in national belonging between themselves and non-migrants in Serbia. On the contrary, they did perceive this difference when it came to the diaspora