On 29 October 2026, Rita Khalaf, co-founder and board member of The Return, took part in the round table “Living, Leaving, Returning in the Cities of the Levant” at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris. The session was part of a day of reflection on the cities of the Levant, organised by the IMA with the Levantine Heritage Foundation around four round tables on their urban, historical, memorial and identity dynamics. This panel, held in partnership with L’Œuvre d’Orient and moderated by Eglantine Gabaix-Hialé, examined how successive waves of migration have reshaped these cities, and the place of those who keep a connection with their city of origin despite the distance.
Rita shared the panel with Kamel Doraï, a CNRS geographer and director of the French Institute of the Near East (Ifpo) in Beirut, whose research covers Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi refugees and transnational practices, and Shaza Maddad, a Syrian journalist and filmmaker who went back to Syria after fourteen years in exile to report on the country. The discussion combined academic research on asylum and diaspora with direct experience of return. Rita brought to it her work on exile, return and the ties that people in the diaspora maintain with the places they come from.
An architect by training, Rita is completing a doctorate at ENSA Paris-Val de Seine and Université Paris Cité on Mosul, her home city. Research of this kind is one of the ways members of a diaspora keep a connection with a place they no longer live in: documenting a city’s history and memory keeps it present for those who left, and produces knowledge that can serve those who stayed or may come back. It belongs to what researchers call return mobilities, the movements back and forth through which people maintain contact with their place of origin through visits, family, professional projects or study, without necessarily settling there permanently.
This perspective is close to The Return’s own work. The NGO supports members of the Iraqi diaspora in their return on a case-by-case basis, and advocates in Iraq and abroad for the conditions that make return possible. In practice, return is rarely a single decision; it tends to build up through repeated stays, sustained ties and gradual reinvestment in the home country. Rita’s participation in the IMA round table brought this Iraqi experience into a wider regional discussion on the cities of the Levant.
