Making Home: Ngo Perspectives on Syrian Return and Belonging After Assad

Since 2011, the Syrian civil war has displaced 14 million people from their homes, including nearly 7 million refugees who have fled across international borders. 13 years later, the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 reintroduced a possibility long considered out of reach: return. As Syrians across the diaspora began weighing repatriation decisions, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published a website that defines home in one simple phrase: “Syria is Home.” But what does it mean for Syria to be “Home”? And how are displaced Syrians navigating return decisions amid ongoing instability? This study addresses these questions through semi-structured interviews with eight staff members representing six grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that engage directly with Syrian refugees in Jordan and the United States. Drawing on feminist geopolitics and critical refugee studies, the analysis employs Brun and Fábos’s (2020) constellations of home framework, which conceptualizes home-making in displacement as a dynamic interplay of material, affective, and institutional dimensions. Mapping interview data onto this framework reveals a reality far more complex than the nation-state–centric definition of home often promoted in international migration policy. Three key themes emerge: 1) tension between affective and material dimensions of home; 2) variation across gender, age, and national contexts; and 3) waiting and temporality. Ultimately, this project seeks to broaden our understandings of home, while uplifting organizational practices that are responsive to Syrian refugees’ evolving visions of home in this post-Assad context.