This article examines the role of ethnic identity in the notion and practice of “minority return” in the ‘Western Balkans’ by combining a discourse analysis of scholarship on minority return with qualitative research among returnees minoritised at their place of origin in Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia. It argues that – through fixing ethnic identity in time and space - minority return constitutes a bordered and bounded identity construction, which is more often imposed on than claimed by individuals and obscures situational, future-oriented and multiple forms of identification. Literature on minority return largely treats ethnicity and minority as self-evident analytical categories, (re)producing the ethnic boundaries related to wars and ethnic mobilisation. The empirical material, based on 76 interviews, demonstrates that ethnic identifications are highly contingent on institutional and interactional contexts. While respondents readily provided ethnic identifications where such categories were socially or institutionally meaningful, ethnicity was less prominent in individual accounts of belonging and absent from stated conditions for remaining after return. We conclude that minority return constitutes a specific ethnicised approach to return reflecting post-war legacies, stakeholder interests converging in the ‘return intervention-nexus’ and a broader Balkanist epistemology that privileges ethnicity as an explanatory framework for social dynamics. Return scholarship would be well-advised to interrogate ethnic identities from the perspectives of minoritised people themselves and as epistemological and institutional processes acknowledging individual identifications unequally.