In September 2016 the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations (UN) signed an agreement making the IOM ‘part of the UN family’ and a ‘related organisation’ to the UN.1 This decision was formalised during the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants, organised largely in response to the refugee/migrant crisis in the Euro-Mediterranean region, and which kicked off the negotiations over the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (adopted in December 2018). Since then, the IOM has been presenting itself, on its website for example, as the ‘UN migration agency’.
This is in many respects a turning point. Since the 1990s, migration has progressively been recognised as a global issue. The traditional way states have addressed international migration, based on nationally defined, unilateral and often ad hoc political strategies, has been deemed inadequate and increasingly unable to face the growing challenges posed by the mobility of people worldwide. More than 20 years ago, Myron Weiner (1995) spoke of a ‘global migration crisis’, while Saskia Sassen (1996) argued that states were ‘losing control’ over transnational flows of people. The main political response to such a ‘crisis’ has been the massive securitisation of migration through tougher legislation and increased border control. Yet, in the face of the difficulties faced by states in governing migration, notions such as cooperation, global governance or management have become popular in scholarly and policy debates: what they have in common is an emphasis on the need for comprehensive policy approaches, based on the recognition that migration is a structural feature of a globalising world that cannot be merely stopped by border control measures, and that international or multilateral concertation between states is needed to govern such a far-reaching and transnational social phenomenon.
This has placed international organisations (IOs) at the forefront of the debate. IOs are indeed expected to constitute the building blocks of global governance and help governments achieve their political objectives. Their interventions are particularly valued for global and complex issues, like development, climate change or trade, which are beyond the scope of national policymaking and call for interstate cooperation. Yet, while the UN has a ‘refugee agency’, and many of its specialised agencies have been involved in migration-related issues, it lacked a ‘migration agency’. Even though the IOM was created in 1951, contemporaneous to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, it was not perceived as a genuine migration agency for reasons that included its exteriority to the UN system, its chaotic history and its fairly limited number of member-states. Quite a few proposals were made in this respect, ranging from the creation of a brand-new UN agency to the establishment of interagency cooperation platforms or the merging of already-existing organisations.
Today the debate seems to be settled: the IOM has become the UN migration agency. As such, it has played a central role in the discussions surrounding the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and, more broadly, is likely to exert a strong influence on the future evolution of global migration governance . It is perhaps too early to examine the outcomes of this new institutional configuration or to assess whether, or how, state policies will be impacted. Yet, this new context calls for a better understanding of this largely unknown, but very active, organisation. Based on a broad and encompassing definition of migration, the IOM indeed does many things. It intervenes in crises—wars, armed conflicts or natural disasters—to assist displaced people, both internally and internationally. It provides advice to the governments of member-states in designing migration policies. It facilitates interstate discussions and cooperation over migration issues. It serves as a service provider to actually implement aspects of migration policy outsourced by governments (like the readmission of migrants through return migration, counter-trafficking measures or labour migration programmes). It trains all kinds of actors, including state employees, media or non-governmental organisations (NGOs ). It does research on migration, publishes extensively and gathers data.
Because migration rarely takes place in isolation from other social phenomena, the IOM is also involved in a wide range of other issues connected to human mobility. The chapters in this book show how the IOM is active in fields such as health and epidemics, terrorism and Islamic radicalisation , economic development and entrepreneurship, gender equality and women’s vulnerability, humanitarian protection and human rights, climate change and sustainable development, and so on. The development and diversification of the IOM’s projects and activities are an ongoing and rapid process: in 1991, the organisation had 43 member-states and a US $300 million budget (Ducasse-Rogier 2002; Georgi 2010); in 2018, the number of member-states reached 172 and the budget was estimated at US $1.8 billion.2 This has come along with a substantial expansion in terms of staff and field locations. Yet, while the IOM is expanding and increasingly under scrutiny, little is known of its history, mode of functioning, activities, or projects.
The purpose of this book is therefore to bring together contributions that, though quite different in terms of scope, discipline, topic or methodology, expand our field of knowledge about the IOM. This enables a comprehensive overview of the research questions raised by this organisation. This introductory chapter has two objectives: firstly, to provide an overview of existing research on the IOM in order to contextualise the findings of the book’s chapters; and secondly, to summarise the key arguments developed by the contributors to this edited volume.
A Short History of the IOM
Today, the IOM is a leader in global migration governance. But this has not always been the case: the IOM’s history reveals how the organisation has long been somewhat marginal; its current expansion dates back to the 1990s, in sharp contrast with previous decades during which it was struggling to survive. Yet the IOM’s history also reveals a few long-standing characteristics that are still valid today, making a short historical overview relevant to understanding the current situation.
The Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movements of Migrants from Europe (PICMME) was created in 1951. A few months later, this committee was renamed the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM). In 1980, it became the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration and, in 1989, received its current name: the International Organization for Migration.3 As its initial appellations indicate, the IOM was created in response to a specifically European context: World War II had displaced millions of people across the continent, and this ‘overpopulation’ was perceived as a challenge for states and a threat to Europe’s socio-economic and political recovery. The IOM’s task was to address these concerns, mainly by facilitating the out-migration of Europeans to other world regions (North America, Australia, Latin America).
But the founding states were reluctant to fund a new organisation and outsource their sovereign right to control migration.4 It was thus agreed that the IOM would stick to merely logistical work. This accounted for the IOM’s reputation as a ‘travel agency’ that did little more than organise the trips of migrants—a reputation that, while largely outdated, is sometimes still recalled.5 It was also agreed that the organisation would be dismantled once Europe’s ‘overpopulation’ would be solved. But this technical and temporary mandate progressively became more encompassing: the IOM became involved in such activities as the recruitment of migrants; the provision of information and language classes to recently arrived migrants; the examination of their health conditions; the development of housing facilities; the facilitation of migrant’s socio-economic integration by prospecting for opportunities in receiving regions; or negotiations over political agreements between sending and receiving states.
This took place in the early Cold War context. At the time, ‘overpopulation’ was understood as an obstacle to European political stability and therefore as a factor favourable to Communist influence in Western Europe. States such as the US and the UK saw displaced people as an obstacle to the Marshall Plan. The IOM’s mission was therefore to help ‘eliminate potential social and political tensions in Europe … to contain the spread of Communism’ (Parsanoglou 2015, 59). It followed that the IOM brought together only like-minded ‘capitalist’ governments. This was formalised in its Constitution: membership was possible only for states that supported ‘free movement’ (that is to say, that did not prevent their citizens from freely emigrating, as did the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] and its allies). As a Europe-centred organisation, the IOM further excluded newly independent countries in Asia or Africa.
This historical sketch highlights several features of the IOM that still hold true today. While formerly limited to technical tasks, the IOM was from the sta...