Emotions in return migration and rural developmentMigration is highly emotional (Castles, de Haas, and Miller 2014) and often evokes strong feelings of optimism for human and economic development in societies of origin.In 1998, during a period of harsh economic and political transition in Russia, temporary labour migration started from Teriberka, a small, remote Russian village on the Barents Sea coast, to Båtsfjord, an equally small village in the Norwegian Arctic.The labour mobility programme brought about 40 villagers, mainly women, to work in the fish-processing industry in Båtsfjord.Most of the migrants were formerly employed at the kolkhoz in Teriberka -a fishing and fish-processing collective farm established in the Soviet era.The migration was designed to fit Norwegian regulations, which restricted the work to two years of unskilled jobs in the fish-processing industry in northern Norway for Russian workers (no families).The mobility programme was organised by Norwegian and Russian businessmen as part of a broader development project in Teriberka.The migration organisers, most migrants, villagers, and politicians expected that the migration would improve the migrants' and their families' situation and catalyse economic activity and development in the declining Russian village.They hoped for a better life for migrants and the community, while fear, euphoria, joy, homesickness, disillusionment, and nostalgia for the Soviet past were other strong feelings.With extensions of the work permits, the migration ceased after three years and most migrants returned to Teriberka.Thus, return migration occurred, which refers to migrants returning to their countries of origin or later generations returning to their family's homeland (Kunoroglu et al. 2016).In Teriberka, the migrants returned after backand-forth migration but the expected developmental outcomes of migration were not achieved.The extent of the emotional strain contained in people's stories drove us to acknowledge affectivity as a way of comprehending the world (Markussen 2006).This motivated our examination of the emotional underpinnings of this rural return migration and its lack of impact on the development of Teriberka.