The International Organization for Migration: The New ‘UN Migration Agency’ in Critical Perspective (International Political Economy Series) 3030329763, 9783030329761

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The International Organization for Migration The New ‘UN Migration Agency’ in Critical Perspective

Edited by  Martin Geiger · Antoine Pécoud

International Political Economy Series Series Editor Timothy M. Shaw Visiting Professor University of Massachusetts Boston Boston, MA, USA Emeritus Professor University of London London, UK

The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increasingly challenges the North as the centre of development, also reflected in a growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone economies in Southern Europe. An indispensable resource for scholars and researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and policies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic North declines and ‘the rest’, especially the BRICS, rise. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13996

Martin Geiger  •  Antoine Pécoud Editors

The International Organization for Migration The New ‘UN Migration Agency’ in Critical Perspective

Editors Martin Geiger Carleton University Ottawa, Canada

Antoine Pécoud University of Sorbonne Paris Nord Paris, France

ISSN 2662-2483     ISSN 2662-2491 (electronic) International Political Economy Series ISBN 978-3-030-32975-4    ISBN 978-3-030-32976-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Rob Friedman/iStockphoto.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 I ntroduction: The International Organization for Migration as the New ‘UN Migration Agency’  1 Antoine Pécoud 2 U  nfinished Business: The IOM and Migrants’ Human Rights 29 Elspeth Guild, Stefanie Grant, and Kees Groenendijk 3 G  endering Migration Management 53 Rianne Mahon 4 D  rivers of Expenditure Allocation in the IOM: Refugees, Donors, and International Bureaucracy 75 Ronny Patz and Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir 5 B  etween Migration and Development: The IOM’s Development Fund 99 Erin Newman-Grigg 6 M  easuring ‘Well-Governed’ Migration: The IOM’s Migration Governance Indicators123 Corey Robinson

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7 The IOM in Building and Supporting Migration Management in China145 Yadi Zhang and Martin Geiger 8 K  nowledge Production at the IOM: Looking for Local Knowledge in Tajikistan173 Karolina Kluczewska 9 T  he IOM’s Missing Migrants Project: The Global Authority on Border Deaths195 Yussef Al Tamimi, Paolo Cuttitta, and Tamara Last 10 T  he IOM’s Humanitarian Border Management in the West African Ebola Crisis (2014–2016)217 Tilmann Scherf 11 H  umanitarian Detention and Deportation: The IOM and Anti-Trafficking in Laos245 Estelle Miramond 12 T  he IOM’s Crisis Management and the Expulsion of Ethiopians from Saudi Arabia271 Clara Lecadet 13 P  ossible Futures? The New ‘UN Migration Agency’ and the Shifting Global Order293 Martin Geiger Index307

Notes on Contributors

Yussef Al Tamimi  is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute (EUI), Italy. He is researching the notion of identity and belonging in human rights law, combining legal and theoretical methodology. His research interests include human rights, social theory, citizenship, the sense of belonging and the role of affect in democracy. He was a visiting researcher at New York University’s School of Law in 2019. Before joining the EUI, he was a junior lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and worked with the Dutch State Attorney. Al Tamimi holds an LLM cum laude in Constitutional and Administrative Law and an MA in Philosophy of Law from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His thesis on the notion of vulnerability in human rights law was awarded the Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award and the Jan Brouwer Award for best thesis in the field of human rights in the Netherlands and Belgium. In 2016, Al Tamimi completed his MSc in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Oxford, gaining a distinction for his thesis on social citizenship and higher education reforms. Paolo Cuttitta  is a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Sorbonne Paris Nord, France. He has previously worked at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Palermo University. Cuttitta investigates the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in migration management in North Africa. His research on the EU/North African border regime and on humanitarian migration management resulted in several publications, also including recent articles in journals such as ACME, Antipode and Geopolitics. His publications include Segnali di confine. Il controllo dell’immigrazione nel vii

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mondo-frontiera (2007), Lo spettacolo del confine. Lampedusa tra produzione e messa in scena della frontiera (2012) and the co-edited volume Migrazioni, frontiere, diritti (2006). His new co-edited book Border Deaths: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-Related Mortality was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2019. Martin Geiger  is Associate Professor of Politics of Migration and Mobility at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His research, writing and teaching question the role of international organisations and non-­state actors in migration and border politics, and the links between migration and innovation and development. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of several articles, chapters and books published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies or the International Political Economy book series (Palgrave Macmillan), including The Politics of International Migration Management (2010/2012) and Disciplining the Transnational Mobility of People (2013). He is also the founding and lead editor of the Mobility & Politics series with Palgrave Macmillan; corresponding member of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrück University (Germany); steering committee member of the International Metropolis Network; and non-resident research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing (China). Stefanie  Grant is a human rights expert affiliated with LSE Human Rights, Amnesty International, the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, and the 2005 Global Commission on International Migration. She is Chair of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. Her research addresses the human rights consequences of leaving a country of nationality as a refugee or migrant, with a recent focus on deaths during migrant cross-border journeys, the identification of those who die and the rights of their families; she advised the International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Missing Migrants project. Kees  Groenendijk is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Law at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, founder and research fellow of its Centre for Migration Law and member of the Standing Committee of Experts on international immigration, refugee and criminal law (Meijers Committee). He is an honorary member of the Odysseus Network of Experts on European Migration and Asylum Law and member of the

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Board of Editors of the journal Asiel & Migrantenrecht. He has written on the social and legal status of immigrants, EU and national migration law, legal integration of immigrants and nationality law. Elspeth  Guild  is Jean Monnet Professor at Queen Mary University of London, UK, as well as at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her interests and expertise lie in the area of EU law, in particular EU Justice and Home Affairs (including immigration, asylum, border controls, criminal law and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters). She also researches EU privacy and data protection law and the nexus with human rights. She is the co-editor of the European Journal of Migration and Law and co-editor of the book series Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy in Europe. Karolina Kluczewska  is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sorbonne Paris Nord, France. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research interests include development aid, particularly in relation to migration, health governance and women’s rights. She has written articles in the Central Asian Survey, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding and Revue d’Études Comparatives Est-Ouest. Tamara  Last holds a PhD, entitled ‘Deaths Along Southern EU Borders’, from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2018. As part of her research, she designed and managed the Deaths at the Borders Database, the first compilation of official evidence pertaining to deceased persons whose bodies were found or brought to southern EU shores. Last’s PhD drew on this data to analyse the low identification rates of dead bodies believed to be those of irregular migrants and to test the reliability of the news-sourced data policymakers and academics alike depend on. From 2013 to 2018, she participated in several international meetings on border death data and engaged closely with the International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Missing Migrants Project from its inception. Clara Lecadet  is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research and a member of the Institut Interdisciplinaire pour l’Anthropologie du Contemporain (EHESS-CNRS) in Paris, France. Her research focuses on the emergence of deported migrants’ protest movements in Africa and on the various forms of organisation used by deportees during the post-deportation

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period. She co-edited with Michel Agier Un monde de camps (2014) and Après les camps. Traces, mémoires et mutations des camps de réfugiés (2019) with Jean-Frédéric de Hasque. She is the author of Le manifeste des expulsés (2016). She is participating in the ‘Air Deportation Project’ (2017–2022) directed by William Walters in Carleton University, Canada. Rianne Mahon  is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She has written numerous articles and chapters on industrial policy, labour market restructuring, childcare politics and the redesign of welfare regimes at the local, national and global scales. Mahon has co-edited several books including After ’08: Social Policy and the Global Financial Crisis (with G.  Boychuk and S.  McBride) and Achieving the Social Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges (with S. Horton and S.  Dalby), and co-authored Advanced Introduction to Social Policy with Daniel Béland. Her current work focuses on the ‘gendering’ of global governance through international organisations, with a particular focus on transnational care chains. Estelle Miramond  is a PhD candidate at Paris Diderot University (Paris VII), France. Drawing on her fieldwork in Laos and expertise in gender and migration issues, her research explores the paradoxes of counter-­ trafficking policies between Thailand and Laos. After completing a Master’s degree in Gender and Development at Paris Diderot University (Paris VII), she began her doctoral research in 2014 in the Department of Social and Political Change (Paris VII). With funding from the Émilie du Châtelet Institute, her thesis explores the feminisation of labour migrations in Laos and the development of policies against female sex trafficking across the Lao-Thai border. Miramond has edited a journal issue on L’intersectionalité à l’épreuve du terrain for Les Cahiers du CEDREF and has been published in La Revue Française de Sciences Politiques. She has contributed to a community-based, participatory research project in Laos on migration issues through the Institute of Research on Development (IRD). Erin  Newman-Grigg is a graduate of Carleton University, Ottawa (Canada). Her research interests include the nexus of migration and development, community-based development approaches and gender and development. She has focused specifically on the increased use of international remittances in development policy, as well as their effects on development indicators such as education and health for children.

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Ronny  Patz is a postdoctoral research fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich, Germany, where he works in the ‘International Public Administration’ Research Unit financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He has researched budgeting in international organisations, in particular in the EU and in the UN system (2014–2017) as well as resource mobilisation by international organisations (IOs) in the domain of global refugee policy (since 2017). His monograph Managing Money and Discord in the UN (with Klaus H. Goetz) was published in March 2019. Antoine Pécoud  is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sorbonne Paris Nord, France, research associate at CERI/Sciences Po and fellow at the Institut des Migrations. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and has previously worked for UNESCO’s programme on international migration. He is the author of Depoliticising Migration: Global Governance and International Migration Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the co-editor of Migration Without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People (2007), Migration and Human Rights: The United Nations Convention on Migrant Workers’ Rights (2009), The Politics of International Migration Management (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Migration and Climate Change (2011), Disciplining the Transnational Mobility of People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), International Organisations and the Politics of Migration (2015) and Migration, Free Movement and Regional Integration (2017). Corey Robinson  is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto, and a graduate fellow at York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. Robinson’s research documents and analyses the growing preoccupation with ‘managing’ the security challenges and development opportunities associated with international migration, particularly in the Canadian context. His areas of specialisation include irregular migration, migrant smuggling, the politics of ‘migration management’, global migration governance and the role of intergovernmental organisations in the field of migration. His work has appeared in International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Tilmann  Scherf is a former research associate at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700 ‘Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood’, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research interests include international security, peace and conflict studies, with a thematic focus on

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international mobility, borders and migration. His PhD thesis (published in 2018) analysed the intersection of distinct rationalities of international border security governance in West Africa using the example of Côte d’Ivoire. His co-authored articles (with Sina Birkholz and Ursula Schröder) have been published in Third World Quarterly and Cooperation & Conflict. Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir  is a post-doctoral research fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich, Germany, where she works in the ‘International Public Administration’ Research Unit financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her other research focuses on the bureaucratic politics of international organisations, especially the United Nations, with a particular focus on budgeting and finance. Prior to receiving her PhD, she was a Senior Policy Analyst at the International Peace Institute in New York City, where she researched the UN’s response to transnational threats and challenges. She completed her MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester and also holds a BA degree and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University. Yadi Zhang  is a PhD candidate at the School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. She is also a part-time researcher at the Center for Non-Traditional Security and Peaceful Development Studies. Her PhD thesis analyses the protection of Chinese overseas labour migration from a perspective of governance theory. She has written several academic articles about irregular migration, labour migration and global migration governance. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University and furthered her studies with a Master’s degree in International Relations at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. She also served as a coordinator for Friends of the Earth (Birmingham) in the UK after graduation.

Abbreviations

ASEAN CERF COMMIT CSOs DFID ECOSOC EIU EU FAO GCR GFPs GMDAC GMG HBM HBMM ICEM ICMP ICMPD ICRC IDF IDM IDPs ILO INGOs IO IOM IR

Association of Southeast Asian Nations Central Emergency Fund Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative against Trafficking Civil Society Organisations UK’s Department for International Development United Nations Economic and Social Council Economist Intelligence Unit European Union Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees Gender focal points Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (IOM) Global Migration Group Humanitarian Border Management Health, Border and Mobility Management Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration International Commission for Missing Persons International Centre for Migration Policy Development International Committee of the Red Cross International Development Fund (IOM) International Dialogue on Migration Internally displaced people International Labour Organization International non-governmental organisations International organisations International Organization for Migration International Relations xiii

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Abbreviations

IRC IRO IS MMP NGOs OCHA OFWs OHCHR PICMME PRC PSEA RQAN SAPs SDG SIA SWAP UN UNCTAD UN-DESA UNDP UNEP UNHCR UNICEF UNITAR UNODC US USAID USAIM VoTs WHO

International Rescue Committee International Refugee Organisation Islamic State Missing Migrants Project Non-governmental organisations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (IOM) Overseas Filipino Workers Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movements of Migrants from Europe People’s Republic of China Prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse Return of Qualified African Nationals Structural Adjustment Programmes Sustainable development goals State Immigration Administration (China) United Nations System-Wide Action Plan for Implementation of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women United Nations United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs United Nations Development Programme United Nations Environment Programme United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Institute for Training and Research United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime United States United States Agency for International Development United States Association for International Migration Victims of Trafficking World Health Organization

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Total country-level expenditures in the IOM and UNHCR. (Source: Annual financial reports) Fig. 4.2 Total state voluntary contributions to the IOM and UNHCR. (Source: Annual financial reports) Fig. 4.3 Total populations of concern. (Source: UNHCR population statistics database) Fig. 4.4 Twenty countries that received the highest total funding from the IOM during 1999–2016. Panel 1 shows country-level expenditures; panel 2 shows the total number of refugees; and panel 3 shows the total number of other populations of concern Fig. 5.1 Funding totals by region (2001–2015) Fig. 5.2 Funding allocation by year (2001–2015) Fig. 7.1 The IOM and the emergence of collaboration with the PRC Fig. 9.1 Chronological graph of MMP-related activities and number of IOM press releases mentioning the MMP from January 2013 to December 2018. (Source of graph: own elaboration. Source of press releases: IOM (www.iom.int))

86 87 89

93 112 113 150

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 7.1 Table 7.2

Fixed-effects ordinary least squares (OLS) regression Selected IOM projects in China (2008–2016) Components of IOM migration management

91 153 158

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The International Organization for Migration as the New ‘UN Migration Agency’ Antoine Pécoud

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  https://www.iom.int/news/iom-becomes-related-organization-un

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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

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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.

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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 3  For detailed information on the IOM’s history, see Bast 2010; Ducasse-Rogier 2002; Elie 2010; Feldblum 1999; Georgi 2010, 2019; In-Chuen Koh 2009; Karatani 2005; Perruchoud 1989; Venturas 2015. 4  Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany (Federal Republic), Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey and the US. 5  It is worth recalling here that the IOM negotiates preferential fares with a large range of airlines and is therefore in a position to transport migrants at low costs.

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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 start a politicised organisation, closely associated with US leadership and with a homogeneous group of developed, ‘white’ and capitalist Western states. There is an ongoing contrast between the ‘practical’ or ‘technical’ nature of its work, on the one hand, and its embeddedness in a political environment largely dominated by Western states, as well as by a specific understanding of how migration (and societies at large) should be governed, on the other. The IOM’s history helps explain the motivations for the frequent argument in the current literature that the IOM is a ‘neoliberal’ organisation whose raison d’être is to govern human mobility in the interest of the capitalist ruling class. The IOM’s history also helps explain why it has long maintained a complex relationship to the UN. The American government was sceptical of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as it favoured the actual transportation of people (rather than their protection), while also fearing Communist influence in UN agencies. The IOM was therefore to be ‘the UNHCR’s operational, United States-controlled counterpart’ (Parsanoglou 2015, 64). This made for a sharp and lasting distinction between the two organisations. The IOM’s focus on organising economic migration also  helps explain why it had a tense relationship to the International

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Labour Organization (ILO), which was more centred on protecting migrant workers’ rights. The rivalry and tensions between the IOM and UN agencies are still perceptible today. They are grounded in substantial normative issues: the IOM’s exteriority towards the UN does indeed make for key differences in terms of its normative mandate, as the IOM is not bound by the human rights framework that forms the basis of UN’s work. This also makes for differences in terms of adapting to new issues and challenges: the IOM, for instance, has been shown to have reacted more flexibly to the growing policy salience of environmental migration, whereas the UNHCR has displayed a tendency to stick to its mandate, reluctant to address new policy issues (Hall 2015). In practice, however, there is evidence that the IOM and the UN do cooperate quite extensively, both at headquarters level and in the field. The 2016 UN-IOM agreement has of course profoundly modified the IOM-UN relationship, bringing the two much closer to each other than they have ever been—even though the IOM remains a ‘related organisation’, that is to say, not a full member of the UN system. Once Europe’s ‘overpopulation’ problem was over, the IOM needed to re-establish its relevance in a changing geopolitical environment. This opened a long period of uncertainty that ended in 1989, when the IOM was eventually transformed into a permanent organisation. In a Cold War context marked by the salience of East-West mobility, the IOM managed to display its usefulness on different occasions. One landmark was the 1956 Hungarian refugee crisis, during which the IOM arranged for the resettlement of refugees fleeing the repression after the uprisings. Another landmark was the 1990–1991 First Gulf War, when the IOM was in charge of migrant workers fleeing Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion (to the detriment of UNHCR’s traditional role as the main refugee agency).

The IOM and State Sovereignty Despite ongoing discussions over international norms and cooperation mechanisms, such as the above-mentioned Global Compact, migration remains an issue closely associated with state sovereignty. While there is an international regime in the field of asylum and refugees based on the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the UNHCR, no such framework exists for migration. In the face of state reluctance towards international norms and supranational actors, one of the main

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questions raised by the IOM’s growth concerns its relationship to states and state sovereignty. Like any other intergovernmental organisation, the IOM is formally governed by its member-states. The autonomy of IOs is a long-standing debate: while their dependence upon governments is undeniable, their capacity to display agency and gain a certain degree of independence from their constituency is equally evident. This is important for the relevance of researching the IOM: if the IOM merely executes states’ instructions, its political role is limited and there is no reason to study the IOM per se; but if the IOM manages to achieve some autonomy, it can exert an influence on migration policies and should be viewed as a political actor in its own right (Geiger and Koch 2018). Empirical research on this issue is mostly about Europe and the relationship between the European Union (EU) and non-European countries. There is evidence that the EU relies on the IOM, especially when it comes to cooperating with sending and transit states like Morocco, Albania, Turkey or Ukraine. In general, Europe’s objective is to involve the government of those countries in the control of migration and to externalise border control. The IOM plays a role in these negotiations: formally, it helps states achieve agreements by acting as a neutral go-­ between that does not interfere with the political orientations of the contracting states or the content of the negotiations. In practice, though, the IOM’s role is more important: the organisation actually proposes projects, elaborates the narratives to justify them and finds funding to implement these projects.6 This central role is due to the IOM’s bureaucratic skills, its strong presence in the field and its experience and expertise, all of which enable the organisation to become a key partner upon which all parties end up being dependent (Den Hertog 2017; Wunderlich 2012). The IOM’s key role is also due to the sensitivity of migration-related issues. European receiving states want to work with sending and transit states, but in the absence of an agreed-upon regime, they cannot simply impose their norms and views and must formally respect the sovereignty of those other countries. This creates a need for intermediaries like IOs, with the reputation of being neutral and trustworthy by all parties (Korneev 2014; Lavenex 2016). Indeed, a key argument in the 6  For example, the IOM regularly publishes a kind of ‘catalogue’ that proposes a list of relevant projects to be funded by governments or other donors: the organisation thus identifies and defines potential ‘initiatives’ and actively ‘sells’ them to states (see IOM 2018).

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IOM’s rhetoric is that it helps all countries, whether sending, transit or receiving, in both the Global North and the Global South. But, of course, power imbalances between states do not disappear and, while claiming to work in the interest of all, the IOM is regularly showed to promote only the interests of Western developed countries. In other words, while the IOM can indeed display autonomy, it can only challenge the (weak) sovereignty of non-Western states—leaving untouched the power of Western governments (Brachet 2016; Geiger 2010; Georgi 2010). Ashutosh and Mountz (2011) even argue that through the IOM powerful receiving states manage to expand their sovereignty by controlling migrants far away from their borders. Indeed, as a globally present organisation, the IOM can intervene anywhere in the world and create the conditions for a globalisation of migration control; Düvell (2003) sees the IOM’s network of field offices as a ‘global migration warning system’ capable of monitoring human mobility worldwide. Such externalisation/globalisation of border control is achieved not through coercive measures, but through persuasion and consensus-­ building. In the words of Andrijasevic and Walters (2010), the IOM is a ‘post-imperial’ actor that does not impose norms but persuades states to adopt them. Its apparently naïve and innocent rhetoric, captured in slogans such as ‘managing migration for the benefit of all’, strategically emphasises the shared benefits of its interventions and downplays the power imbalances between states.7 This calls for paying attention to seemingly mundane activities like capacity building, training of officials or the socialisation of policymakers (Dini 2018; Fine 2018). What is at stake here is a ‘disciplining’ activity in which governments are instructed how to behave and persuaded to (self-)impose norms upon themselves (Geiger and Pécoud 2013). Ashutosh and Mountz (2011) further demonstrate how the IOM functions as a ‘consent-generating apparatus’ by constructing a depoliticised consensus on migration policy that hides the political divergences between states. This is achieved through discourse and policy measures that mix security concerns over border control with humanitarian measures supposedly in favour of migrants. For example, the IOM runs counter-­ trafficking information campaigns in which the risks of migrating and 7  See, for example, https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/about-iom/iom_snapshot_ a4_en.pdf

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being trafficked are used as arguments to discourage potential migrants from leaving their country (Bartels 2017; Heller 2014; Nieuwenhuys and Pécoud 2007). In the same way, the IOM also operates so-called voluntary return programme with the objective of sending unwanted migrants back to their country of origin without constraints (Collyer 2012; Koch 2014; Lochan 2017). In both cases, a consensual and migrant-friendly rhetoric hides the asymmetric power relations between countries and the predominance of the political agenda of Western states. It is worth noting, however, that the sovereignty of developed receiving states may also be challenged by the IOM. In Canada, for instance, Geiger (2018) reports that the government has expressed concerns with what it perceives to be the uncontrollable expansion of IOM’s activities. Canada has, however, decided to remain within an IO that is a key player in migration policy debates. While the lack of studies of the relationship between the IOM and its member-states makes it difficult to generalise this case, it shows that the IOM can achieve a certain autonomy even towards one of its key donors, a highly developed and experienced migrant-­ receiving country. In sum, the absence of an internationally agreed-upon political agenda over migration could have been expected to weaken the IOM because it deprives the organisation from political legitimacy and keeps migration policy in the sovereign realm. Historically, this has indeed been the case, as the IOM’s troubled history indicates. But recent developments rather tend to show that, on the contrary, this normative and political ‘no man’s land’ has paved the way for an entrepreneurial attitude which has become characteristic of the IOM as it ventures into new policy arenas and fills in the gaps left by the non-existence of a regime. It follows that, even if the IOM’s role is limited to that of an intermediary with no political influence, its central position in the field, expertise and knowledge of states’ agendas enable it to play a de facto important role. While formally respecting state sovereignty, the IOM thus modifies (or even expands) the nature of this sovereignty, first, by depoliticising it and making political measures sound technical and therefore more acceptable, and, second, by embedding political interventions in a humanitarian and development-friendly framework.

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The IOM and the Global Economy While international migration is understood by governments as a matter of sovereignty, there is abundant evidence that the cross-border mobility of people is very profoundly shaped by economic factors, including for instance development differentials between world regions and the demand for foreign labour. This raises the issue of how, as an intergovernmental organisation, the IOM relates to the world economy and to the centrality of labour migration in the organisation of global capitalism. As noted earlier, the IOM was from the start embedded in a market-­ friendly environment. Its founding states were all Western capitalist countries which rejected the strict control of in- and out-migration that characterised Communist countries; human mobility was seen as a necessary step to ensure economic growth in Europe. Since the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe in 1989, the idea that national economies should be opened to the circulation of goods and capital, and that this openness may also entail labour mobility, is more dominant than ever. It is no coincidence that the IOM became a permanent organisation and started experiencing substantial growth in the 1990s, at a time when virtually all countries became part of a globalising economy. The IOM is still dominated by such a market-friendly philosophy. In an analysis of IOM’s discourses and narratives, Campillo Carrete and Gasper conclude that the IOM ‘does not conceive patterns of life not dominated by market rationality’ (2011, 131). Its rhetoric is dominated by the concept of ‘migration management’, which conveys the predominance of a managerial and cost-benefit approach to migration (Geiger and Pécoud 2010). The IOM explicitly understands migration in a framework of a supply-and-demand mechanism, in which properly ‘managed’ labour mobility should connect labour surpluses in less-developed regions with the demand for migrant workers in the North—a policy objective that the IOM describes as ‘a broad and coherent global strategy to better match demand for migrant workers with supply in a safe, humane and orderly way’ (IOM 2008, 11). Practically, this means operating labour migration programmes or providing labour migrants with training and information (Barber and Bryan 2018; Gabriel and Macdonald 2018; Valarezo 2015). Such projects turn the IOM into a kind of labour recruitment agency, a role that is quite distinct from the traditional functions of an IO. Indeed, several observers have noted that the IOM, while formally operating as an intergovernmental entity, is actually governed in a way akin to a private

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enterprise, performing largely economic functions (Bradley 2017). This goes along with an emphasis, by the IOM itself, on cost-efficiency and the capacity to provide competitive services to states. This market logic pervades the IOM’s internal organisation and inspires a specific way of managing its budget, known as ‘projectisation’: funding is tied to specific activities and the IOM is therefore constrained to constantly seek new projects. Projectisation is also coupled with a strong degree of decentralisation, as field offices are quite independent from headquarters in Geneva and responsible for securing their own funds. In other words, the IOM combines state concerns about control with market needs for the circulation of labour. As Dupeyron (2016) notes, market-based patterns of socio-economic organisation do not reduce the role of the state but rather require governments to proactively govern the ‘neoliberal state’. According to critical observers, this is precisely what happens when the IOM combines an emphasis on the control of migration with the utilitarian regulation of labour migration in the interests of employers. Georgi and Schatral write that the ‘IOM actively propagates and contributes to the modernization and perfection of the system of global apartheid by performing control functions, expanding state capacities and rationalizing controls with its utilitarian migration-management ideology’ (2012, 213). The IOM’s raison d’être would be to overcome the contradiction between the nationalist/protectionist agenda over border control and the need for a flexible foreign workforce in a globalising economy. Georgi (2010) further explains the IOM’s growth since the 1980s by arguing that it is a post-Fordist organisation whose function is to help states control the movement of people that stem from economic deregulation. A core element of neoliberalism is the emphasis on flexibility and the necessary adaptation of people to a global macroeconomic context that is thought to be unchangeable. When it comes to migration, this implies that migration is understood as a necessary component of the way in which individuals and societies cope with structural forces. Indeed, the IOM’s activities and discourse are often based on the assumption that the core features of the world’s political and economic organisation are to be taken for granted and that, consequently, people themselves must adapt. When it comes to climate change, for example, the IOM sees migration as an adaptation strategy; this takes for granted the vulnerability of the Global South in terms of environmental change and places the burden of finding solutions onto migrants’ shoulders (Felli 2013).

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This philosophy pervades the IOM projects. Information campaigns, for example, aim to reduce irregular migration not by tackling the root causes that lead people to leave their countries but by targeting individual decisions to migrate. The assumption is that the problem lies not with inequalities or other structural forces but with individual choices (De Jong and Dannecker 2017; Nieuwenhuys and Pécoud 2007). This is also the case with the IOM’s anti-trafficking strategy, where the emphasis is put systematically on trafficked migrants’ individual vulnerability. While apprehending migrants as ‘victims’ in need of protection may appear generous, it leaves untouched the key elements of the context in which trafficking occurs, including unemployment, gender inequalities, the need for flexible labour and so on (Schatral 2010). Ahouga (2018) develops a related argument by showing that the IOM tends to view local actors (at the city level, for instance) as central in solving the problems raised by inadequate immigration policies, such as migrants’ welfare, housing or health problems. This approach assumes that the core political and economic strategies of states (e.g. in terms of migrants’ illegalisation) cannot be modified. In sum, the IOM’s ‘migration management’ agenda aspires to govern the migration flows stemming from global capitalism, underdevelopment or inequalities without addressing these underlying factors.

The IOM, Humanitarian Protection and Human Rights Along with state sovereign control over migration and market needs for labour mobility, the IOM’s third proclaimed pillar is the protection of migrants. At first sight, this makes a lot of sense: migrants indeed constitute a vulnerable group of people and one of the key missions of IOs is to assist people in need of protection. Throughout the world, the IOM systematically presents itself as committed to helping vulnerable migrants and has become a key humanitarian actor. Yet, in the face of the IOM’s involvement in control- and market-oriented activities, its capacity to really protect migrants has been questioned: critical observers have long expressed doubts regarding the IOM’s sincerity, suspecting it of cynically putting forward humanitarian concerns to hide its actual intentions (see, e.g. Brachet 2016). The central issue here is that the IOM has no ‘protection mandate’. It has long been situated outside the UN system and is therefore not bound by the UN Charter. The IOM’s Constitution lists the ‘purposes and functions’ of the organisation, but migrant protection is not listed and no

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reference is made to the fundamental rights of migrants. The IOM’s new status as a related agency to the UN has slightly modified this state of affairs, but it remains the case that the IOM has historically never given priority to human rights or international human rights law. This is a major area of concern for civil society organisations (CSOs) and even for the UN: in 2013 the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, wrote that ‘the mandate and funding of IOM pose structural problems with regard to fully adopting a human rights framework’ (UN 2013, 12). These concerns are further enhanced by the IOM’s ‘projectisation’. The project-based system means that the IOM can only do what states want (and pay) it to do; the IOM is unlikely to resist implementing projects that would be incompatible with its (weak) standards. This contrasts to IOs with a normative mandate, which regularly criticise governments for failing to respect human rights standards. The IOM never criticizes its member-states: while consistent with its donor-driven nature, this is slightly puzzling in a world in which state treatment of immigrants leads to serious human rights violations. To follow the categories proposed by Lavenex (2016), the IOM can thus act as a ‘subcontractor’ (implementing aspects of migration policy on behalf of states) or ‘transmitter’ (diffusing norms from one country to another), but not as a ‘counterweight’ (which would imply criticising, correcting or balancing states’ political orientations). Concerns over the IOM’s respect for migrant rights are all the more acute because of its historical closeness to Western receiving states. As noted earlier, the IOM tends to align itself with the agenda of the Global North and is thus bound to be involved in some of the toughest measures designed to fight undocumented migration. There is a growing body of research that documents how the IOM activities, by prioritising the deterrence objectives of Western states, end up jeopardising the rights of migrants and refugees (Flynn 2017; Hirsch and Doig 2018; Morris 2005; Schatral 2010). There is also evidence that the IOM’s weak human rights standards have enabled it to become more popular with governments, especially at the expense of the UNHCR. In Europe, for instance, the ‘IOM’s broader and more flexible mandate as well as its superior administrative capacities make it more “successful” than UNHCR’ (Wunderlich 2012, 496; see also Thorvaldsdottir et al. 2018). The IOM’s defence is that well-managed migration has positive outcomes in terms of human rights: ‘Although IOM has no legal protection mandate, the fact remains

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that its activities contribute to protecting human rights, having the effect, or consequence, of protecting persons involved in migration’.8 If the IOM’s relationship to human rights is problematic, this does not prevent it from playing a key role in the field of humanitarian protection and development. Frowd (2018) argues that humanitarian and development concerns pervade the ethos of staff members and play a central role in the IOM’s  outreach and reputation in less-developed regions. The IOM is a key player in post-disaster interventions, in counter-trafficking, in migrant health and in engagement for development by diasporas—all fields in which the key objective is not simply the enforcement of border controls or the organisation of labour mobility but the overall well-being of a population. In other words, when the IOM deals with security or market issues, it does so in a broadly defined ‘humanitarian’ or ‘developmental’ manner. The issue, then, is whether these concerns merely represent a way of paying lip service to protection imperatives without modifying control- or market-related priorities or whether they genuinely pave the way for new policy approaches that benefit migrants themselves, in line with the IOM rhetoric. Finally, the IOM’s involvement in protection, humanitarian and development activities raises the issue of its cooperation with CSOs. Traditionally, IOs work closely with NGOs, and the IOM is no exception. Yet cooperation is not always smooth. Major human rights NGOs, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have sharply criticised the IOM, while many other CSOs perceive the IOM as a rival in the humanitarian marketplace. Other associations feel threatened or ignored by the IOM’s project. In some cases, the IOM has even sponsored the creation of new NGOs to challenge already-existing ones, thereby prompting accusations of manipulation (Caillault 2012; Georgi and Schatral 2012).

The IOM and Knowledge Production Bringing together security, market and humanitarian/development concerns is no easy task. There are obvious and profound tensions between these different objectives, which cast doubt on the IOM’s claim to simultaneously meet all these objectives—and satisfy all its partners, including governments, market actors and CSOs. One way of overcoming this problem is by elaborating a specific set of worldviews and knowledge ­concerning 8

 https://www.iom.int/mission

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migration and how it should be governed. If pursuing these different objectives is difficult in the ‘real world’, it is perhaps easier to do ‘on paper’ by shaping the way migration is cognitively apprehended. Again, this is one of the traditional functions of an IO: by producing data and issuing normative policy recommendations, IOs ‘construct the social world’ and, in so doing, acquire power and legitimacy (Barnett and Finnemore 1999). The keyword here is probably ‘migration management’. This notion has been popularised by the IOM as a way of bringing under a single umbrella its wide range of activities and the multiple objectives it pursues. The core elements of the ‘management’ framework put forward by the IOM include: (1) the description of migration as a ‘global’ issue that must be ‘globally’ addressed through international cooperation; (2) a pragmatic appreciation of migration as a normal process that should benefit sending and receiving countries as well as migrants (‘triple-win’); (3) the aspiration to ‘well-managed’ or ‘orderly’ migration flows, as opposed to unauthorised migration; (4) the linkages between migration and other policy fields, like development or climate change; and (5) an adherence to universal principles, including human rights to some extent, but also free markets (Geiger and Pécoud 2010; Pécoud 2018). Through this framework, the IOM speaks to three political agendas: (1) security concerns and state control over borders; (2) labour market preoccupations with economic migration; and (3) the imperative to protect migrants through humanitarian interventions and development. This enables the IOM to interact with a wide range of actors, including not only governments but also the private sector, the UN system, NGOs, media and researchers. As Brachet writes, the IOM is a kind of ‘hub’ for discussions and policy debates on migration: The IOM … operate[s] as an open device that constantly attracts and integrates new players into its networks, as interlocutors, consultants, experts or even partners, and who are gradually led to share and adopt its own reasoning. In this way, the IOM incites states as well as non-state actors … to think and act in similar ways. It thereby strengthens a particular kind of a globally homogeneous governmentality of borders and international migration. (2016, 277)

Through such mechanisms of debate and knowledge production, local realities are made legible at the global level, while international migration

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narratives serve as blueprints to understand local trends (Bartels 2018; Korneev 2018; Pécoud 2015). This ‘management’ framework has become dominant at the intergovernmental level. For example, whereas the 2000 Millennium Development Goals did not refer to migration, the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals call for ‘facilitat[ing] orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’ (objective 10.7). The IOM has thus clearly been successful in promoting a specific construction of migration issues. This points to the importance of activities such as the publication of reports, the organisation of workshops, the production of data, the issuance of press statements or media interventions—all of which enable the IOM to shape the general perception of migration, to propose categories through which it is classified and governed and to diffuse normative standards regarding what ‘sound’, ‘balanced’ or ‘comprehensive’ policies should look like. Critical analysis of the IOM’s knowledge and discourse production has highlighted its depoliticising effect. In describing migration and prescribing what should be done, the IOM systematically downplays politically delicate aspects that could challenge state strategies. For example, in its study of the migration of women from Bolivia to Argentina, the IOM’s explanatory framework centred on the concept of trafficking and the vulnerability of migrants to the detriment of other policy approaches concerned with labour protection or state responsibility (Basok et al. 2013; see also Schatral 2011). In the same vein, Düvell (2012) argues that the concept of ‘transit migration’ was created in the 1990s by the IOM (and a few other organisations) to legitimise the EU’s attempts to externalise migration control. ‘Transit migration’ conveyed the idea that neighbouring ‘transit’ countries needed support to address irregular migration—thereby silencing the role that Europe’s tighter border controls played in transforming these spaces into transit regions. The IOM has also recently become interested in migrant deaths at the border: yet it addresses this highly sensitive issue without at all questioning the role of restrictive policies in receiving states in making migrant journeys dangerous and sometimes deadly (Heller and Pécoud 2020). The IOM’s knowledge production is thus politically situated and designed to suit the interests of its member-states. One could further add that such knowledge production also suits the IOM’s own corporate

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interests: the way the IOM understands migration and describes ­migration-­related problems is inevitably tied to its own strategy and its attempts to sell its services to governments. It follows that the IOM will only diagnose problems that it can help solve, no matter whether those problems are the most relevant ones or its proposed solutions can make any difference. Knowledge production is thus no longer an issue for research or expertise only, it becomes a de facto commercial issue enabling the growth of the IOM’s business. This has implications for the research community. Like many other IOs, the IOM maintains a kind of ‘epistemic community’ of researchers and experts who regularly write reports, intervene at conferences, propose policy recommendations (and get paid to do so). Such cooperation with academics also includes publications: for example, the IOM manages its own scholarly journal, entitled International Migration, in which university researchers routinely publish their work. The coexistence between the intergovernmental and political nature of the IOM and the exercise of independent/critical research is potentially problematic, however (for a recent example, see Dehm and Vogl 2019).

Overview of Book Chapters In Chap. 2, Elspeth Guild, Stefanie Grant and Kees Groenendijk provide an in-depth analysis of the human rights implications of the 2016 IOM-UN agreement. They highlight the tension between the two institutions. The UN is deeply concerned with the human rights of migrants, which are, for example, the object of regular General Assembly resolutions. The IOM, by contrast, is a non-normative organisation that, as discussed earlier, has never made human rights a priority. The IOM is merely a ‘related agency’, a status that grants a certain autonomy and therefore enables the IOM to maintain its distinct non-normative approach. Important problems remain. One of them is the cooperation between the IOM and UN agencies working on migration (like the UNHCR, the ILO or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights): such cooperation is necessary but made difficult by the lack of common standards. In particular, UN agencies give priority to international human rights law, whereas IOM’s Constitution calls for respecting the national laws of its member-states. Guild, Grant and Groenendijk therefore argue that the IOM should reconsider its relationship to human rights, which would entail a thorough revision of its Constitution.

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In Chap. 3, Rianne Mahon proposes the first comprehensive examination of the IOM’s approach to gender-related issues. She shows that while the IOM has adopted an ambitious gender-mainstreaming strategy, there are discrepancies in the way it has been implemented. For example, gender remains an issue mainly for the IOM Headquarters, while field offices are much less active. Also, gender is a recent issue for the IOM: it is a field in which the UN took the lead and the IOM followed. Yet the IOM’s management approach did incorporate gender concerns, and one of the most visible outcomes of this encounter is in human trafficking. The IOM is massively involved in counter-trafficking activities, a field in which—as discussed earlier—the aspiration to protect women is inextricably mixed with the objective of controlling human mobility. The IOM has also taken innovative gender-related initiatives, particularly in the topic of the care chain and the consequences of women’s migration on left-behind children and relatives. But while the IOM has managed to increase the visibility of this issue, Mahon finds that it has hardly been able to go beyond the publication of reports because this topic is at odds with the interests of member-­states and has therefore failed to secure proper funding. In Chap. 4, Ronny Patz and Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir provide a quantitative assessment of the specificity of the IOM with respect to the UNHCR. As noted earlier, the differences between these two organisations are long-standing and structural features of global migration governance. By looking at their budget and the way they allocate their funds, this chapter demonstrates that there are indeed fundamental differences between the two. The IOM is much more aligned to the interests of donors and governments than the UNHCR, tending to intervene in contexts that are deemed strategic by its member-states, whereas the UNHCR allocates funds on the basis of the location of refugees. Another major difference is that the IOM is much more present inside Western donor countries while the UNHCR’s activities are concentrated outside the Global North. In Chap. 5, Erin Newman-Grigg offers a thorough study of the IOM’s involvement in the issue of development and remittances. Even though this topic is often associated with other IOs (such as the World Bank), this chapter provides evidence that the IOM, especially with its Development Fund, is a key actor in the field. Remittances are shown to be central to the IOM projects which systematically engage diaspora and migrant associations for the purpose of encouraging them to fuel development in their home country. This conveys the idea that emigrants should maintain close

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and lasting ties to their homeland and that they should take up responsibilities in sectors such as health, education or infrastructure that are traditionally associated with states. This fits into the above-discussed neoliberal philosophy that underlies much of the IOM’s work and that posits that migrants themselves need to adapt and find solutions in an unequal world characterised by deep development differentials. Chapter 6 by Corey Robinson explores the implications of a recent initiative by the IOM, namely the Migration Governance Index. This Index was launched in 2016 with the purpose of evaluating state migration policies and measuring their compliance with the migration-related objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals. While the IOM claims to work in a non-normative manner and merely follow the requests of member-states, this benchmarking exercise contains quite explicit norms pertaining to what a ‘good’ migration policy should look like. Yet this is done in a technical and depoliticised way through expertise and data production. This project also sheds light on the IOM’s political autonomy, as the development of such an index provides the organisation with some freedom in terms of how to assess state policies. This echoes similar and better-known initiatives by other IOs, such as the Human Development Index produced by the UN Development Programme. These constitute clear illustrations of how knowledge and politics are intertwined and how expertise confers legitimacy to IOs. In Chap. 7, Yadi Zhang and Martin Geiger look at a very recent development in migration politics and in the IOM’s constituency, namely the decision by the Chinese government to join the organisation in 2016. Like Russia, China was one of the key states that occupied a central role in the UN system and the Security Council but remained absent from the IOM—an absence that pointed to the IOM’s difficulty in becoming a truly global organisation. One of the implications of China’s growing role in the world economy is that it is experiencing greater migration flows, especially as far as labour mobility is concerned. This makes its membership in the IOM relevant, so Zhang and Geiger analyse the patterns of cooperation that are developing in this context. In Chap. 8, Karolina Kluczewska examines how the IOM’s office in Tajikistan gathered information on return migration to the country. This activity was funded by Western states, which led to an important bias: the study ended up looking above all at the issue of radicalisation among returned migrants despite the lack of evidence on the matter. This sheds light on the interplay between different kinds of knowledge, produced at

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different levels and by different actors. In particular, the IOM navigates between a global—or ‘modern’—knowledge produced at the global level and a local knowledge produced at the country level. Knowledge production is then situated in different political contexts, which leads to inconsistencies and distortions in what is known about migration realities. Kluczewska further documents an issue that has been overlooked in existing research on the IOM, namely rivalry between offices. She shows that besides the IOM’s traditional competition with other IOs, there are important tensions between its own field offices, which is important in understanding how the organisation develops its strategies and activities. Chapter 9, by Yussef Al Tamimi, Paolo Cuttitta and Tamara Last, builds upon the two previous chapters by analysing another recent initiative by the IOM that also pertains to knowledge production. The Missing Migrant Project was launched in 2014 to document border deaths worldwide. It has become an authoritative source of information, widely used by researchers and the media. Through such a project, the IOM presents itself as a technical and neutral organisation providing objective facts; the project also testifies to the IOM’s humanitarian preoccupation with migrant vulnerability and life-saving activities. As the authors show, the IOM operates in a competitive environment, as the issue of migrant deaths is also dealt with by NGOs and other IOs. The Missing Migrant Project is therefore a way of establishing the IOM’s relevance and centrality. Moreover, this initiative illustrates the ambivalence of the IOM’s depoliticising efforts: by sticking to the role of a neutral information provider, the IOM leaves unchanged the political context of migrant deaths and the role of receiving states. It even obscures its own role therein, as the IOM is directly involved in some of the strategies to prevent unauthorised migration. Chapter 10 by Tilmann Scherf provides a case study that illuminates the interplay between security concerns over border control and humanitarian preoccupations with peoples’ well-being. The chapter shows how the IOM’s response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 fit into the organisation’s ‘Humanitarian Border Management’ strategy, according to which securing the border is key to addressing the vulnerability of populations. The border is understood as a fragile place that must be taken care of for both security and humanitarian reasons. The underlying rationale behind this argument is closely connected to state-building efforts: good governance is indeed associated with well-managed borders—both to control and to protect, i.e. two of the most fundamental prerogatives of states. As far as the IOM itself is concerned, this is strategic as it enables

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the organisation to speak to different audiences and to align itself to the interests of a wide range of partners (and donors). In Chap. 11, Estelle Miramond looks at another case study marked by this mix of control and protection, namely the IOM’s counter-trafficking projects among migrants from Laos in Thailand. The IOM’s work in this context is shown to have profound gender consequences, as it frames women as victims or as at risk of being trafficked. This leads to measures that reduce women’s mobility perspectives: they are indeed encouraged to stay at home or to return home. Alternatively, they are ‘sheltered’ in centres where their freedom is seriously jeopardised. Thus, the claimed objective of protecting women is not met as gender inequalities are increased and the fundamental human rights of women are threatened. In Chap. 12, Clara Lecadet analyses a key activity of the IOM, the so-­ called voluntary return of migrants. While much of the research done on this type of activity is centred on Europe, this chapter looks at the expulsion of Ethiopians from Saudi Arabia. Lecadet points out that the IOM has long been obsessed by return: many of its activities are built upon the premise that migrants should eventually return home, which highlights a sedentary bias (or a culture of immobility). The development of the IOM’s activities in this field has transformed this organisation into a ‘deportation entrepreneur’ that relentlessly seeks to return migrants on the basis of a rhetoric centred on voluntariness and reintegration efforts. This chapter also illustrates how the IOM benefits from crisis contexts, which enable it to showcase its efficiency and capacity and thus attract funding.

Conclusion When it comes to the IOM’s role and influence, migration researchers do not seem to agree. Some dismiss the IOM as an organisation that struggles to survive, remains captive to powerful states, limits itself to rhetoric with no impact on the ground and proves unable to transform the global politics of migration. Castles et al., for example, argue that the IOM ‘lacks the capacity to bring about significant change’ (2014, 18). Others are more positive: they recognise the IOM’s utility and believe that it should play a greater role. Susan Martin, for instance, argues that the IOM has ‘the strongest capabilities to take on the range of activities needed if an international migration regime were to be adopted’ (2014, 124). Finally, other observers agree that the IOM is influential—but vehemently criticise it for being a kind of hidden brain behind the worst aspects of the treatment of

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migrants by Western states. From this perspective, the IOM promotes a hegemonic world order in which human mobility would be managed in the interests of the capitalist ruling class. These disagreements reflect the complexity of the issues raised by research on the IOM. For example, the chapters in this book clearly document how the IOM functions as a service provider that depends upon governments. Yet they also show that the IOM displays autonomy and is influential in diffusing normative views regarding what migration is all about (data, trends, etc.) and what it should look like (policy recommendations, etc.). Theoretically, there are ways to surmount the contradiction, by analysing, for example, the strength of soft power or the bargaining power of intermediaries. But this nevertheless makes for quite conflicting interpretations of the IOM’s role. These disagreements also lead to different views in terms of whether or not the IOM deserves to be an object of study for migration research: some call for more research to shed light on the IOM’s underestimated influence while others see no reasons to study it. This book suggests that the IOM should be considered as a symptom of most, if not all, the transformations currently affecting the politics of migration. The IOM reflects a world in which migration is talked about everywhere by a wide range of actors (governments, IOs, NGOs, researchers, the media, etc.). It also reflects a world in which governing human mobility has become a major concern and in which many other key global issues (development, health, security or climate change) are now connected, in one way or another, with migration. The IOM’s history shows that migration has long been perceived either as a secondary issue not worthy of a dedicated IO or as a matter of strict state sovereignty. This is changing, and the IOM’s developments offer a privileged standpoint to observe these transformations. Finally, the IOM reflects a world in which the distinction between controlling and protecting people is fading away. This establishes a structural connection between migration, security, development and human rights—leading to a mélange des genres that is at the heart of the IOM’s work. Of course, the IOM did not create this situation, which can therefore be studied without investigating this organisation. But the IOM mirrors, and benefits from, this state of affairs. This is why, somehow, one keeps coming across the IOM as an operator of migration policy, as a conference-­ organiser, as a report-publisher, as a data-producer or as the employer of people researchers meet here and there. The IOM is neither dominant nor negligible. It is an actor in the growingly populated field of migration governance whose role must be explicated and interrogated.

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Works Cited Ahouga, Y. 2018. The Local Turn in Migration Management: The IOM and the Engagement of Local Authorities. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (9): 1523–1540. Andrijasevic, R., and W.  Walters. 2010. The International Organization for Migration and the International Government of Borders. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (6): 977–999. Ashutosh, I., and A.  Mountz. 2011. Migration Management for the Benefit of Whom? Interrogating the Work of the International Organization for Migration. Citizenship Studies 15 (1): 21–38. Barber, P. Gardiner, and C. Bryan. 2018. IOM in the Field: “Walking the Talk” of Global Migration Management in Manila. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1725–1742. Barnett, M., and M. Finnemore. 1999. The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations. International Organization 53 (4): 699–732. Bartels, I. 2017. “We Must Do It Gently”: The Contested Implementation of IOM’s Migration Management in Morocco. Migration Studies 5 (3): 315–336. ———. 2018. Practices and Power of Knowledge Dissemination: International Organizations in the Externalization of Migration Management in Morocco and Tunisia. Movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies 4 (1): 47–66. Basok, T., N.  Piper, and V.  Simmons. 2013. Disciplining Female Migration in Argentina. In Disciplining the Transnational Mobility of People, ed. M. Geiger and A. Pécoud, 162–184. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bast, J. 2010. International Organization for Migration (IOM). In Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, ed. R. Wolfrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press. At https://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/ 9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1708. Brachet, J. 2016. Policing the Desert: The IOM in Libya Beyond War and Peace. Antipode 48 (2): 272–292. Bradley, M. 2017. The International Organization for Migration (IOM): Gaining Power in the Forced Migration Regime. Refuge 33 (1): 97–106. Caillault, C. 2012. The Implementation of Coherent Migration Management Through IOM Programs in Morocco. In The New Politics of International Mobility. Migration Management and Its Discontents, ed. M.  Geiger and A. Pécoud, vol. 40, 133–156. Osnabrück: IMIS-Beiträge. Campillo Carrete, B., and D. Gasper. 2011. Managing Migration in the IOM’s World Migration Report 2008. In Transnational Migration and Human Security: The Migration-Development-Security Nexus, ed. T.-D.  Truong and D. Gasper, 117–131. New York: Springer.

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Castles, S., H. de Haas, and M. Miller. 2014. The Age of Migration. International Population Movements in the Modern World. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Collyer, M. 2012. Deportation and the Micropolitics of Exclusion: The Rise of Removals from the UK to Sri Lanka. Geopolitics 17 (2): 276–292. De Jong, S., and P. Dannecker. 2017. Managing Migration with Stories? The IOM “I Am a Migrant” Campaign. Journal für Entwicklungspolitik/Austrian Journal of Development Studies 33 (1): 75–101. Dehm, A., and A. Vogl. 2019. The Ethics of Academic Publishing and International Migration’s “Policy Interview” with Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs. At https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2019/02/ethics-academic Den Hertog, L. 2017. Implementers? The Role of International Organisations in EU Funding for External Migration Policy. Journal of Regional Security 12 (1): 5–26. Dini, S. 2018. Migration Management, Capacity Building and the Sovereignty of an African State: IOM in Djibouti. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1691–1705. Ducasse-Rogier, M. 2002. The International Organization for Migration, 1951–2001. Geneva: IOM. Dupeyron, B. 2016. Secluding North America’s Migration Outcasts: Notes on the International Organization for Migration’s Compassionate Mercenary Business. In The Externalization of Migration Management in Europe and North America, ed. R. Zaiotti, 238–258. London: Routledge. Düvell, F. 2003. The Globalisation of Migration Control. openDemocracy. At https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/globalisation-of-migration-control/ ———. 2012. Transit Migration: A Blurred and Politicised Concept. Population, Space and Place 18 (4): 415–427. Elie, J. 2010. The Historical Roots of Cooperation Between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration. Global Governance 16 (3): 345–360. Feldblum, M. 1999. Passage-Making and Service Creation in International Migration. Paper Prepared for the International Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, February 16–20. Felli, R. 2013. Managing Climate Insecurity by Ensuring Continuous Capital Accumulation: “Climate Refugees” and “Climate Migrants”. New Political Economy 18 (3): 337–363. Fine, S. 2018. Liaisons, Labeling and Laws: International Organization for Migration Bordercratic Interventions in Turkey. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1743–1755. Flynn, M. 2017. Kidnapped, Trafficked, Detained? The Implications of Non-state Actor Involvement in Immigration Detention. Journal on Migration and Human Security 5 (3): 593–613.

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Frowd, P.M. 2018. Developmental Borderwork and the International Organization for Migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1656–1672. Gabriel, C., and L.  Macdonald. 2018. After the International Organization for Migration: Recruitment of Guatemalan Temporary Agricultural Workers to Canada. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1706–1724. Geiger, M. 2010. Mobility, Development, Protection, EU-Integration! The IOM’s National Migration Strategy for Albania. In The Politics of International Migration Management, ed. M. Geiger and A. Pécoud, 141–159. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Ideal Partnership or Marriage of Convenience? Canada’s Ambivalent Relationship with the International Organization for Migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1639–1655. Geiger, M., and M. Koch. 2018. World Organizations in Migration Politics: The International Organization for Migration. Journal of International Organization Studies 9 (1): 25–44. Geiger, M., and A.  Pécoud, eds. 2010. The Politics of International Migration Management. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———, eds. 2013. Disciplining the Transnational Mobility of People. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Georgi, F. 2010. For the Benefit of Some: The International Organization for Migration and Its Global Migration Management. In The Politics of International Migration Management, ed. M.  Geiger and A.  Pécoud, 45–72. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Managing Migration? Eine kritische Geschichte der Internationalen Organisation für Migration (IOM). Berlin: Bertz und Fischer. Georgi, F., and S. Schatral. 2012. Towards a Critical Theory of Migration Control: The Case of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). In The New Politics of International Mobility. Migration Management and Its Discontents, ed. M. Geiger and A. Pécoud, vol. 40, 193–222. Osnabrück: IMIS-Beiträge. Hall, N. 2015. Money or Mandate? Why International Organizations Engage with the Climate Change Regime. Global Environmental Politics 15 (2): 79–97. Heller, C. 2014. Perception Management – Deterring Potential Migrants Through Information Campaigns. Global Media and Communication 10 (3): 303–318. Heller, C., and A. Pécoud. 2020. Counting Migrants’ Deaths at the Border: From Civil Society Counter-statistics to (Inter)Governmental Recuperation. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764219882996. Hirsch, A.L., and C.  Doig. 2018. Outsourcing Control: The International Organization for Migration in Indonesia. The International Journal of Human Rights 22 (5): 681–708. In-Chuen Koh, K. 2009. International Organization for Migration. In Handbook of Transnational Economic Governance Regimes, ed. C. Tietje and A. Brouder, 191–200. Leiden: Brill.

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International Organisation for Migration. 2008. World Migration Report 2008: Managing Labour Mobility in the Evolving Global Economy. Geneva: IOM. ———. 2018. Migration Initiatives 2019. Geneva: IOM. Karatani, R. 2005. How History Separated Refugee and Migrant Regimes: In Search of their Institutional Origins. International Journal of Refugee Law 17 (3): 517–541. Koch, A. 2014. The Politics and Discourse of Migrant Return: The Role of UNHCR and IOM in the Governance of Return. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40 (6): 905–923. Korneev, O. 2014. Exchanging Knowledge, Enhancing Capacities, Developing Mechanisms: IOM’s Role in the Implementation of the EU-Russia Readmission Agreement. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40 (6): 888–904. ———. 2018. Self-Legitimation Through Knowledge Production Partnerships: International Organization of Migration in Central Asia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1673–1690. Lavenex, S. 2016. Multilevelling EU External Governance: The Role of International Organizations in the Diffusion of EU Migration Policies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (4): 554–570. Lochan, A. 2017. The Effects of Assisted Voluntary Return Programs on Marginalized Women: A Critique of the IOM and UNHCR. Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts 4: 21–31. Martin, S. 2014. International Migration: Evolving Trends from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, T. 2005. IOM: Trespassing on Others’ Humanitarian Space? Forced Migration Review 22: 43. Nieuwenhuys, C., and A.  Pécoud. 2007. Human Trafficking, Information Campaigns and Strategies of Migration Control. American Behavioral Scientist 50 (12): 1674–1695. Parsanoglou, D. 2015. Organizing an International Migration Machinery: The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. In International ‘Migration Management’ in the Early Cold War. The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, ed. L. Venturas, 55–85. Corinth: University of the Peloponnese. Pécoud, A. 2015. Depoliticising Migration: Global Governance and International Migration Narratives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. What Do We Know About the International Organization for Migration? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (10): 1621–1638. Perruchoud, R. 1989. From the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to the International Organization for Migration. International Journal of Refugee Law 1 (4): 501–517. Sassen, S. 1996. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalisation. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Schatral, S. 2010. Awareness Raising Campaigns Against Human Trafficking in the Russian Federation: Simply Adding Males or Redefining a Gendered Issue? Anthropology of East Europe Review 28 (1): 239–267. ———. 2011. Categorisation and Instruction: IOM’s Role in Preventing Human Trafficking in the Russian Federation. In Perpetual Motion? Transformation and Transition in Central and Eastern Europe & Russia, ed. T. Bhambry et al., 2–15. London: UCL. Thorvaldsdottir, S., R.  Patz, and K.H.  Goetz. 2018. What Drives Expenditure Allocation in IOs? Problem Pressure, Donor Interests, and Bureaucratic Resource Mobilization in UNHCR and IOM.  Paper Presented at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting, Boston, 30 August–2 September. United Nations. 2013. Human Rights of Migrants: Notes by the Secretary General. New York: UN General Assembly. A/68/283. Valarezo, G. 2015. Offloading Migration Management: The Institutionalized Authority of Non-State Agencies Over the Guatemalan Temporary Agricultural Worker to Canada Project. Journal of International Migration and Integration 16 (3): 661–677. Venturas, L., ed. 2015. International ‘Migration Management’ in the Early Cold War: The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. Corinth: University of the Peloponnese. Weiner, M. 1995. The Global Migration Crisis: The Challenge to States and to Human Rights. New York: Harper Collins. Wunderlich, D. 2012. Europeanization Through the Grapevine: Communication Gaps and the Role of International Organizations in Implementation Networks of EU External Migration Policy. Journal of European Integration 34 (5): 485–503.

CHAPTER 2

Unfinished Business: The IOM and Migrants’ Human Rights Elspeth Guild, Stefanie Grant, and Kees Groenendijk

Introduction On 25 July 2016, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly signed an agreement with the IOM (‘the Agreement’).1 Many UN bodies work closely with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on joint 1  An Agreement concerning the relationship between the United Nations (UN) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A/RES/70/296, Art. 2(5). Treaty, No. 384, UN Treaty Section. The parties had previously operated together on the basis of a 25 June 1996 agreement of cooperation. Relationship agreements in a broadly similar form exist between the UN and a number of specialised agencies.

E. Guild (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Grant LSE, London, UK K. Groenendijk University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Geiger, A. Pécoud (eds.), The International Organization for Migration, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1_2

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projects. The innovation of the Agreement is that the IOM becomes a related agency of the UN, which formally recognises the IOM as an organisation with a leading global role in the field of migration. The IOM also undertakes to conduct its activities in accordance with the UN Charter and ‘with due regard’ to—inter alia—relevant instruments in the human rights field. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the new relationship between the IOM and the UN from the perspective of human rights obligations. How are the human rights of migrants protected and promoted as a result of the Agreement? This question is one of immediate and pressing concern in the context of the UN Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. By placing the IOM close to the driving seat of the Global Compact negotiations and stating it to be a ‘non-­normative organisation’, the issue of fidelity to the UN’s human rights standards for migrants must be addressed (Guild and Grant 2017).

What Is the IOM? The IOM was established in 1951 at the initiative of Belgium and the USA with the objective of refugee resettlement from Europe (Ducasse-­Rogier 2001; Martin 2014; Venturas 2015). As the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME), and then Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), it filled a gap in the international system: the UNHCR focused on asylum and the ILO on temporary labour migration, but there was no international body addressing the relocation of migrants from one country to another. It was therefore created as a state-­owned alternative to existing multilateral organisations established to address refugee and labour migration issues (Martin 2014, 145). By the end of the 1970s, its role had changed—there was no longer a need to siphon off Europe’s surplus population and it was clear that ICEM’s mission was global, not European. In 1989, the change to a global institution was completed when a new Constitution came into force and the name was changed to IOM. The IOM has a long tradition of advising states on national migration policies and laws. Its activities frequently include a human rights dimension, whether it be assisting refugees to find durable solutions or promoting human rights standards in migration. The experience of the authors, all of whom have worked or had contact at one time or another with specific IOM projects, is that human rights compliance is often included in

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the IOM projects. But the centrality of human rights is not reflected in the IOM Constitution. Adopted in 1989, it retained much of the original ICEM 1953 Constitution. Free movement of persons remains a condition of membership, but there is no explicit protection mandate. As the new millennium dawned, the IOM developed its international role as membership expanded and it adopted the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society. Its four key objectives became (1) to assist in meeting the growing operational challenges of migration management; (2) to advance understanding of migration issues; (3) to encourage social and economic development through migration; and (4) to uphold the human dignity and well-being of migrants. According to its website, the IOM has 12 strategic areas of focus. What is noticeable about the IOM’s objectives is the paucity of references to human rights. The only explicit reference appears in strategic focus 2, which is ‘to enhance the humane and orderly management of migration and the effective respect for the human rights of migrants in accordance with international law’.2 A footnote confirms that ‘IOM has no legal protection mandate’, but adds that ‘the fact remains that its activities contribute to protecting human rights, having the effect, or consequence, of protecting persons involved in migration’.3 The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens, in the preamble, by placing human dignity at the core of human rights.4 The first article of the Declaration concerns dignity: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ The articles which follow, forming the foundation of the UN’s human rights acquis, are the result of the duty to respect human dignity. Therefore, at a stretch, the IOM’s fourth objective can be read as an indirect reference to the UN’s human rights standards, though this is not clearly stated. The IOM’s Constitution contains no reference to human rights.5 Its first purpose and function is to make arrangements for the organised transfer of migrants for whom existing facilities are inadequate or who would not otherwise be able to move without special assistance to countries  https://www.iom.int/mission  https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/about-iom/iom_strategic_focus_en.pdf 4  Universal Declaration of Human Rights, preamble 1: ‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. 5  https://www.iom.int/constitution#ch1 2 3

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offering opportunities for orderly migration—in effect, a travel agency for those without the resources to use the private sector and who are no longer welcome where they are. The lack of a legal mandate in the field of human rights has not gone unnoticed by scholars (Aradau 2004; Andrijasevic and Walters 2010; Rahel and Schwenken 2014). It is made more problematic by the primacy which the Constitution gives to national law and policies and the absence of any reference to international law. The Constitution states only that in carrying out its functions, the IOM ‘shall conform to the laws, regulations and policies of the States concerned’ (Art. 1(3)). This has constrained the IOM’s ability to act independently of states or to criticise them if the protection needs of migrants call for such action. This puts the IOM into sharp contrast with the UNHCR, which is also dependent on states for funding but has a convention-based mandate that gives it authority to bring protection concerns to the attention of states and, if the violations persist, even to the Security Council. The IOM does not have similar responsibility in the case of violations of migrants’ rights. It is principally through its programmes and field activities that it can contribute to the protection of migrants (Martin 2014, 133; Goodwin-­ Gill 2016). Over the past decade the IOM Council has adopted policies on human rights and protection.6 Paragraph 2 of the Human Rights Policy clarifies that ‘prime responsibility for ensuring the respect of the human rights of migrants lies with States’. It continues: Each State also has the right—and the duty—to defend and protect its nationals abroad, and to allow other States to protect their nationals residing on its territory. Many other international actors, including IOM, have a key supporting role to play in achieving the effective respect of the human rights of migrants.

The relationship of human rights and a state’s sovereign claim to grant or refuse admission to people at its borders is presented as one of a state’s sovereignty over its nationals wherever they are. This approach is premised on the idea that states have a duty to protect only their own citizens, an outdated notion no longer consistent with international human rights law. 6  https://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/microsites/IDM/workshops/human-rights-migration-november-2009/MC-INF-298-The-Human-Rights-ofMigrants-IOM-Policy-and-Activities.pdf

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The Human Rights Policy seems to have been prepared primarily for internal consumption. Each statement regarding human rights is referenced back to the IOM’s own documents and Constitution, with scant reference to the international human rights obligations of the IOM member states. The policy is flanked by the IOM’s 2015 Policy on Protection, which reiterates the IOM’s duty to respect the human rights of migrants but justifies this by reference to the IOM’s own documents.7 Specifically: IOM meets its obligation to promote and contribute to the protection of migrants and their rights by supporting States and its other partners in their respective protection responsibilities by having a rights-based approach to all its policies, strategies, projects and activities.

This policy of ‘supportive protection’ is implemented through a rights-­ based approach to all activities.8 The IOM protection ‘focuses on effective implementation of existing norms and standards related to the rights of migrants found at the international, regional and national levels’. The first Principle of the IOM’s Migration Governance Framework is adherence to international standards and fulfilment of migrants’ rights. The language of normativity has been central to the debate about the IOM and human rights. In the IOM Council report of 30 June 2016, at paragraph 16 regarding the IOM-UN relationship, reference is made to IOM Resolution 1309 and the overriding need to ensure that the IOM remains ‘a non-normative organization’. This wording, in due course, found its way into the Agreement. ‘Non-normative’ is not a UN term. Human rights are generally accepted to be the normative dimension of UN standard setting (Brownlie 1998). This raises the question: does the term ‘non-normative’ mean that the IOM is not required to work in conformity with UN human rights standards? The IOM has explained its understanding of normativity in the following terms. The IOM aims to ensure that all its activities are consistent with international law, in particular with human rights law. Non-normativity 7 https://governingbodies.iom.int/system/files/en/council/106/C-106-INF-9IOM-Policy-on-Protection.pdf 8  The Policy states that ‘supportive protection is distinguishable from substitutive protection, which is a responsibility that has been conferred on some other organisations and bodies by States through specific and limited international treaties. Substitutive protection stands in addition to the primary protection role of states’ (para. 18).

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excludes it from setting new binding rules and enforcing binding rules upon its member states or other states.9 A further explanation is found in the IOM’s Human Rights Policy, which states that measures to actively promote respect for the human rights of migrants do not mean ‘transforming itself into a supervisory or monitoring agency’ (IOM 2009, 24). But the UN is a fundamentally normative organisation. The second clause of the preamble of the UN Charter states that the parties are determined ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’.10 Article 1(3) of the Charter states that the objective of the UN is [t]o achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

Article 13 gives the General Assembly (GA) the mandate to make recommendations ‘promoting international co-operation in the economic, social, cultural, educational, and health fields, and assisting in the ­realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without 9

 The IOM clarified as follows in an e-mail to Stefanie Grant, 29 November 2017: IOM acknowledges that what is understood by ‘normative’ and ‘non-normative’ varies and can take on many different shapes depending on, inter alia, the context and the academic discipline. IOM understands being non-normative in the specific context of IOM and, hence, understands its non-normativity as being related to legal non-normativity and in a narrow sense, meaning that IOM’s non-normativity excludes it from setting new binding rules and enforcing binding rules upon its Member States or other States. IOM further understands that being a non-normative organization is linked to IOM’s functions and activities. IOM’s understanding of its non-normative nature and functions is based on the IOM Constitution, decisions and policies as adopted by the IOM Council, IOM Member States and the UN General Assembly. IOM does not understand that its non-normativity means to not be required to work in conformity with international law, including human rights law, and therefore allows IOM to be inconsistent with international law, since, in IOM’s view, this would be better referred to as ‘unnormative’, rather than ‘non-normative’. On the contrary, in its activities, IOM aims to ensure that the activities are consistent with international law, in particular with human rights law.  http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/preamble/index.html

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­ istinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’. Article 55(c) requires the d UN to promote ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’. Article 62(2) provides that the Economic and Social Council may ‘make recommendations for the purpose of promoting respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all’. Article 68 authorises the Council to ‘set up commissions in economic and social fields and for the promotion of human rights’. Regarding the trusteeship system, Article 76(c) states that its purpose, inter alia, is ‘to encourage respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion, and to encourage recognition of the interdependence of the peoples of the world’. Article 103 resolves the issue of competing or conflicting obligations in favour of the primacy of the Charter over all other treaty obligations and agreements.11 The UN Charter, therefore, must take priority over the IOM Constitution. The UN has engaged in a very extensive project of standard setting in the field of human rights through treaties adopted by its member states and the work of the Human Rights Council (formerly Human Rights Commission). Member states have provided the Secretary General and the UN system the mandate to help them achieve the standards set out in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.12 All the member states of the IOM are also member states of the UN. Thus the activities of the IOM can be read as being bound through the obligations of its member states to UN human rights standards (Lauterpacht 1936, 54). There are nine core UN human rights conventions.13 Each treaty instrument provides for a committee of experts to monitor implementation of the treaty provisions by state parties; many are supplemented by optional protocols. While the nine core conventions have not been ratified by all states, every IOM member state is a party to at least one and in many cases all the treaties. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which 11  ‘In the event of a conflict between the obligations of the Members of the United Nations under the present Charter and their obligations under any other international agreement, their obligations under the present Charter shall prevail.’ 12  http://www.un.org/en/sections/priorities/human-rights/ 13  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CoreInstruments.aspx

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protects the rights of migrant children, has been ratified by 193 states, including every IOM member state bar one; the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which protects women migrants, has been ratified by 189 states. Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (1990) currently has only 51 state parties and 16 signatories.14 However, all but two of the states are also IOM member states.15 Of the 166 IOM member states, 48 are bound by the UN migrant workers convention. All the IOM member states have ratified other human rights conventions that require that their participation in the IOM activities must be consistent with those obligations. As a result, the IOM activities must be in conformity with the human rights obligations of its member states if they are to not place those members at risk of violating their human rights duties. The IOM member states cannot disregard or circumvent their human rights obligations through the use of the IOM.  The urgent question that remains, though, is how the IOM activities are monitored to ensure that they are human rights compliant.

The IOM’s Status Within the UN On 5 February 2016, then-UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, wrote to the IOM’s Director General, William Lacy Swing, offering three options for a ‘strengthened institutional relationship’ between the UN and IOM. One was to become a specialised agency, another a related agency and the third a ‘sui generis’ agreement including membership in key coordination mechanisms.16 On 25 July 2016, the IOM entered into formal legal relationship with the UN by becoming a related organisation.17 On its face, this is surprising: other related organisations are concerned with issues of trade, atomic energy and weapons control, not with the social and economic well-being of a defined population. As a related agency, the IOM enjoys very considerable independence and autonomy. Unlike the International Labour Organization (ILO), which is a specialised agency, 14  In contrast to the Conventions on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which protects the rights of migrant children and has 193 state parties. 15  The two exceptions are Indonesia and Syria—parties to the UN migrant workers convention but not the IOM member states. 16  Letter from Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General, to William Lacy Swing, Director General, International Organization for Migration, 5 February 2016; on file with authors. 17  A/RES/70/296.

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the IOM does not report to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (see UN Charter, articles 57, 63).18 Unlike UNHCR, the IOM’s executive head is not elected by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Secretary General.19 Unlike the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), it is not part of the UN Secretariat under overall direction of the Secretary General. Whereas the UNHCR Statute requires the High Commissioner to report annually to the General Assembly,20 the IOM has no equivalent reporting obligation: it ‘may, if it decides it to be appropriate’ submit reports on its activities to the General Assembly.21 This status means that the IOM operates with greater independence than other UN institutions in the migration field. The content of the Agreement is thus of great significance. The UN-IOM Agreement On 25 July 2016, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution approving an agreement creating a legal link between the UN and the IOM.22 The negotiating mandate had been authorised on 27 April 2016; much must already have been under discussion so that the formal negotiations could be completed within three months.23 Further evidence of the degree of convergence of approaches is evidenced by the resolution of the IOM Council of 30 June 2016 approving a draft agreement.24 Signature of the UN-IOM Agreement took place on 19 September 2016, the day when the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution calling for a Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Within the IOM, the Agreement holds the status of an international treaty concluded with another international organisation that lays out the working relationship between the IOM and the UN.25

 http://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/about/pdf/ecosoc_chart.pdf  General Assembly Resolution 428 (V) of 14 December 1950, Annex, Chapter III, para. 13. 20  UNHCR Statute, Art.11. http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c39e1.pdf; GA Resolution A/ RES/58/153, 24 June 2004, para. 10. 21  Art. 4, A/RES/70/296. 22  A/RES/70/296. 23  A/RES/70/263. 24  IOM Council Resolution No. 1317, 30 June 2016. 25  Email from IOM to Stefanie Grant, 29 November 2017. 18

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The Agreement opens with a preambular reference to the UN Charter and the IOM Constitution. It continues with an acknowledgement that migration and human mobility must be taken into account in the activities of both organisations, thus entailing close cooperation. The difference between migration and human mobility is not specified and neither term is defined. The preamble refers to various contacts between the UN and IOM from 1992 to 2016, stating that one objective of the Agreement is to establish a mutually beneficial relationship whereby the discharge of respective responsibilities may be facilitated. In the following sections, we examine the provisions of the Agreement, together with our concerns from a human rights perspective. Article 1: The Objective Fulfilment of Two Mandates The first article sets out the objective of the new relationship: to strengthen the IOM-UN cooperation and enhance the ability to fulfil the respective mandates of the two organisations in the interests of migrants and their member states. We consider that the interests of migrants referred to in this provision must include protection of their human rights. When the interests of states and migrants diverge, in our opinion, this includes the right not to be placed in a position of having to relinquish human rights entitlements in order to be able to remain on the territory of a host state. This situation is among the most common which migrants encounter regarding human rights, as ILO research has shown.26 The sovereign right of states to control borders and refuse entry or expel a foreigner frequently places migrants in a situation of vulnerability, where they have to choose between trying to defend their rights, including those of non-­ discrimination, and risking rejection at the border, expulsion or abandoning their human rights claims in the interests of obtaining a residence permit or its renewal. Much of the work of the ILO on labour standards for migrant workers hinges on this conundrum. Accepting discrimination in pay and working conditions between nationals and migrant workers, although a breach of the human rights of migrant workers, is the price states exact either overtly or indirectly from migrant workers through the potential sanction of expulsion. Thus, the interests of migrants and states 26  ILO: General Survey Promoting fair migration—General Survey concerning the migrant workers instruments (2016) https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/WCMS_453917/ lang%2D%2Den/index.htm accessed 28 June 2019.

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can and frequently do diverge. When that happens, the obligation of states to protect human rights can help resolve disputes. Yet there is sometimes a difference of perspective regarding priorities between the approaches of UN agencies and the IOM. While there is frequently a convergence of interests between states and migrants, this is not always the case, particularly regarding state sovereign claims around entry, residence and expulsion. Article 2 of the Agreement recognises this tension. In our experience, the perceived interests of states can be in opposition to those of migrants, particularly when this concerns human rights. The IOM Constitution mandates it to ‘conform’ to the policies and laws of states. The IOM does not have a constitutional obligation to work for migrants.27 The UN is mandated to work in the interests of its member states, but this interest includes the protection of the human rights of all people, migrant or citizen. This is the obligation set out in the Universal Declaration. The different focus of the UN and the IOM could thus become a source of tension in the new relationship. In the second article, the UN recognises the IOM as an organisation with ‘a’ leading global role in the field of migration. This acknowledgement is augmented by a further recognition that the member states of the IOM regard it (with reference to a resolution of the IOM Council) as ‘the’ lead global agency on migration. This is quite a convoluted provision. The evident reluctance on the part of the UN to designate the IOM as the lead migration agency reflects the fact that a large number of UN agencies and programmes are also engaged in migration issues.28 The ILO, for instance, has over 50 years of experience working on the protection of migrant workers who form an important part of the Agreement’s subject matter. The ILO’s tripartite nature, which includes representatives of states, employers and workers, makes it a particularly relevant UN agency in the field of migrant workers. The ILO has two conventions specifically on the subject of migrant workers. Further, in 2016 the ILO’s General Survey focused on promoting fair migration.29 27  In its Preamble, the Constitution refers to the ‘needs of the migrant as an individual human being’. 28  See, for example, the statement signed in 2012 by more than 50 UN organisations and departments at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/Think%20Pieces/13_ migration.pdf 29  ILO: General Survey Promoting fair migration—General Survey concerning the migrant workers instruments (2016) https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/WCMS_453917/ lang%2D%2Den/index.htm, accessed 28 June 2019.

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Similarly, the OHCHR has been very active in the field of migration. In 2016 it worked with other Global Migration Group (GMG) members to develop ‘Principles and Guidelines, Supported by Practical Guidance, on the Human Rights Protection of Migrants in Vulnerable Situations’.30 A year earlier, OHCHR produced, along with the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the ILO, Migration, Human Rights and Governance: Handbook for Parliamentarians (2015).31 The OHCHR’s 2014 Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights at International Borders dealt with the particularly sensitive topic of what state border practices conform with international human rights standards and which do not.32 In 2013 OHCHR produced Migration and Human Rights: Improving Human Rights-Based Governance of International Migration, which sets out a programme for migration management, which is normatively driven and justified.33 These OHCHR activities have not been taken in isolation. It worked with the World Health Organization and the IOM on the report International Migration, Health and Human Rights (2013).34 Thus it would not be correct to place the various UN bodies at loggerheads with the IOM.  This is simply not the case and all the UN agencies engaged with migration issues have worked and continue to work with the IOM, both in the field and at the UN. Not only does the UN not accept the IOM as the lead global agency on migration, but the Agreement also refers to the mandates and activities of the UN, its Offices, Funds and Programmes in the field of migration. This final sentence to the provision reveals another tension in the UN system regarding migration. While article 2(1) of the Agreement is without prejudice to the mandates and activities of the UN, it is clear that there are a lot of different bodies within the UN involved in the subject, as the wording recognises: UN, its Offices, Funds and Programmes. One of the key weaknesses of the UN in the field of migration is the fragmentation of its work.  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Migration/Pages/Draftsforcomments.aspx  h t t p : / / w w w. o h c h r. o r g / D o c u m e n t s / P u b l i c a t i o n s / M i g r a t i o n H R _ a n d _ Governance_HR_PUB_15_3_EN.pdf 32  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Migration/Pages/InternationalBorders.aspx 33  http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Migration/MigrationHR_improvingHR_ Report.pdf 34  h t t p : / / w w w. o h c h r. o r g / D o c u m e n t s / I s s u e s / M i g r a t i o n / W H O _ I O M _ UNOHCHRPublication.pdf 30

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Recognising this problem, in 2006 the UN Secretary General established the GMG, whose participants include the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); ILO; IOM; OHCHR; the UN Regional Commissions; the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF); the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA); the UN Development Programme (UNDP); UNESCO; UN Women; UNHCR; the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); the United Nations Institute for Training and Research’s (UNITAR); UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); the UN Population Fund; the UN University; the World Bank; the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization (WHO). Presumably a rather large room is needed every time the GMG meets. While the IOM is the only GMG body that works exclusively on migration, all the others have a sufficient interest in the subject to be formal members of the GMG.35 The Agreement recognises the diversity of interests and approaches within the UN system. Many of the UN bodies participating in the GMG have fairly targeted interests in the issue of migration, though a substantial number have a development focus. As in many other areas of UN activity, coordination in approaches is a problem, given the wide range of actors with different mandates and objectives. If one were to transpose this problem to the national framework, the conflict would be between interior ministries concerned with security through border controls, residence and expulsion of migrants and other ministries such as health, with an interest in the assurance of public health irrespective of nationality, or social affairs ministries, where family unity is a priority (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010; Baldwin-Edwards 2004). One of the prevailing concerns of European academics is the function creep of interior ministries in the field of migration, where issues properly belonging to the remit of other ministries are appropriated and transformed into the security logic of interior ministries (Guild 2016). There is no easy or singular solution to the issue of multiplicity of approaches to migration or its benefits and drawbacks. It is perhaps an advantage that international organisations are informed primarily by the participation of foreign affairs ministries rather than their interior 35  UNHCR’s mandate is limited to refugees, internally displaced persons and forced migration in general.

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c­ ounterparts, as foreign ministries are much more experienced in balancing (or juggling) the wider interests of the state in the international framework than interior ministries. Article 2(2): IOM’s Assets In Article 2(2) of the Agreement, the UN recognises the IOM as an essential contributor in the field of human mobility, in the protection of migrants, in operational activities, displaced persons and migrant-affected communities including in the areas of resettlement and return as well as mainstreaming migration in development plans. This provision needs to be unpacked to understand exactly what is being agreed upon between the UN and IOM. The first aspect worth noting is that the essential contribution of the IOM is stated to be in the field of human mobility. Once again, the undefined concept of human mobility is preferred over migration (Ghosh 2012).36 The UNDP’s 2009 Human Development Report defines migration as internal or cross-border movement; human mobility is defined as the ‘ability of individuals, families or groups of people to choose their place of residence’ (Klugman 2009). This distinction is not universally agreed upon among UN bodies. The 2012 IOM-UNDESA report examining migration and human mobility in a development context fails to differentiate clearly between the two concepts or specify what the intellectual work of having two concepts means.37 Some economists tend to use the two terms interchangeably.38 Likewise, sociologists have also tended to use the two without differentiation (De Haas 2009). One incisive approach is that of Pécoud and De Guchteneire (2006), who place human mobility as an issue of border controls, while migration includes that aspect but also encompasses what happens to foreigners within the borders of a state as regards residence, work and so on. In more straightforward wording, the Agreement states that the IOM is an essential contributor to the protection of migrants. This is certainly the case as regards a wide range of IOM activities over its existence, not least in facilitating resettlement and evacuation in circumstances of human and natural disaster (Perruchoud 1992) where the value of the IOM’s 36  ‘Human mobility’ is not included in the IOM’s list of Key Migration Terms at https:// www.iom.int/key-migration-terms 37  https://www.iom.int/files/live/sites/iom/files/What-We-Do/docs/HLD-seriesfinal-report-iom-undesa-unfpa.pdf 38  https://www.iom.int/files/live/sites/iom/files/What-We-Do/docs/HLD-seriesfinal-report-iom-undesa-unfpa.pdf

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work has been widely recognised (Martin 2010). The IOM’s 2016 work on migrant border deaths has pioneered a human rights approach calling for states to count and identify the missing as a human rights obligation (Brian and Laszco 2016). The IOM’s beneficial role in some operational activities related to migrants is more contested, especially when it comes to whose interests the activities benefit (Andrijasevic 2006a). The IOM’s role in protecting displaced persons and resettlement raises the thorny question of overlapping operational activities with UNHCR, which has primary responsibility for refugees and internally displaced persons.39 A certain tension between the two agencies has been the subject of academic concern for some time (Byrne et al. 2002; Andrijasevic and Walters 2010). There is an even greater ambiguity with regard to the IOM activities enabling the expulsion of migrants (through the coercive arm of returns). It is here that the greatest concern regarding conflicts between the IOM’s constitutional duty to respect the interests and policies of states and the interests and protection of migrants is the subject of most attention and, in many cases, criticisms from the academic community (Webber 2011; Andrijasevic 2006b; Stančová 2010; Collyer 2012). The IOM has carried out many activities in the field of expulsion, from providing settings for states to discuss (and, some would argue, legitimate) practices around expulsion of migrants,40 to participation in the expulsion process.41 The IOM insists that it contributes only to voluntary returns (expulsion where the migrant agrees to be expelled). However, a number of actors have expressed concern about the voluntariness of expulsion and the degree of coercion that the IOM is willing to accommodate (Frelick 2009). The Council of Europe, for instance, makes specific reference to the IOM in its Twenty Guidelines on Forced Returns (2005).42 Expulsion practices raise many human rights concerns, from the right to protection against refoulement, to the return to a country where there is a real risk of persecution, to torture (Sitaropoulos 2006), the issue of fair procedures (Fekete 2011) and considerations such as family life, the nature and importance of the reason for the expulsion decision (Pattenden 2006),  See http://www.unhcr.org/internally-displaced-people.html  For instance, organising conferences (https://www.iom.int/idmreturnmigration) and training (http://www.iom.int/news/libyan-detention-centre-staff-receive-human-rights-training). 41  https://www.iom.int/news/detained-ethiopian-migrants-return-home-zambia 42  http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/migration/archives/Source/MalagaRegConf/20_ Guidelines_Forced_Return_en.pdf. See commentary paragraphs 1, 7 and Appendix. 39 40

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the use of detention as a precursor to expulsion (Achermann et al. 2013) and effective enforcement of rights of migrant workers against their (former) employers. The human rights obligations which apply to forced expulsions have come under scrutiny, not least by the UN Committee against Torture.43 The engagement of the IOM in ‘voluntary’ return after an expulsion decision has raised the question, examined in the academic literature, about how voluntary the decision of the migrant might be (Lietaert et al. 2016). Although there is strong denial from higher officials at the IOM that the organisation engages with processes of forced expulsion, empirical evidence indicates that local offices reliant on raising funds from governments may not be as careful about the principle as head office (Kalir and Wissink 2016). Article 2(3): IOM as a Non-normative Organisation According to Article 2(3) of the Agreement, the UN recognises that the IOM, by virtue of its Constitution, will function as an independent, autonomous and non-normative organisation in its working relationship with the UN. Reference is made to the essential elements and attributes of the IOM as set out by the IOM Council Resolution 1309, namely that the IOM is the lead global agency on migration and is an intergovernmental, non-normative organisation with its own Constitution and governance system, featuring a predominantly projectised budgetary model and a decentralised organisational structure. The IOM document states, ‘IOM must, in addition to these features, also retain the following attributes to which its Member states attach importance: responsiveness, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and independence’.44 It is fairly clear from the wording of the Agreement that both the UN and IOM understand the terms ‘normative’ and ‘non-normative’ to be centrally connected to and as a way to refer to human rights. In Article 2(4), the IOM recognises the responsibility of the UN due its Charter as well as the mandates and responsibilities of UN bodies, including in the field of migration. The reference to the Charter must be intended to refer to the UN’s human rights commitments. Article 2(5), however, takes the question somewhat further. In this provision, the IOM undertakes to  UN Committee against Torture General Comment No. 3(2012).  https://governingbodies.iom.int/system/files/en/council/106/C-106-RES1309%20IOM-UN%20Relations.pdf 43

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c­ onduct its activities in accordance with the UN Charter, which includes human rights observance. The IOM also engages itself to act with ‘due regard’ to the policies of the UN and other relevant instruments in the fields of international migration, refugees and human rights. Does this acknowledge the primacy of human rights in UN instruments? While the IOM does accept that it must act in accordance with the Charter, the provision seems to imply that this goes no further than having due regard to human rights conventions (as opposed to abiding by them). This uncertainty is reinforced in Article 2(6), which states that the UN and IOM will cooperate and conduct their activities without prejudice to the rights and responsibilities of one another under their respective constituent instruments. One of the human rights which has (arguably) become ius cogens is the prohibition on torture.45 This is not because torture is ineffective or does not work (depending on what the objective of the torture is—for instance as punishment or to extract information from the victim) but because it is wrong and the international community has agreed that it is wrong. This is a normative position. Article 3: UN and IOM—Cooperation of the Organisations This rather cloudy approach to human rights in the Agreement is unhelpful. The guiding principles of the collaboration need to be clear before modalities can be set out, so it is problematic for those principles to be opaque. Article 3, entitled ‘Cooperation and coordination’, exemplifies the issue. In this provision, the UN and IOM agree to work jointly to achieve mutual objectives. The purpose is to facilitate effective exercise of their responsibilities in accordance with their respective constituent instruments. Does this mean that the UN must cooperate in the pursuit of human rights objectives but the IOM participates on a ‘non-normative’ basis, without any obligation to pursue human rights compatible outcomes? The UN and IOM recognise the desirability of cooperation in the statistical field (within their mandates). This opens a can of worms regarding counting migrants (and possibly human mobility). The issue has been something of a headache for the UN and IOM since the sources of statistical information are varied, held by different ministries and departments at the state level and are often highly contested or just simply inaccurate. Yet  Other human rights such as the right to life may also come within this category.

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policies regarding migrants and human mobility depend on knowing how many migrants there are, where they live and who they are. While in humanitarian crises people tend to self-identify as migrants (for evacuation in the face of a disaster, for instance), most of the time migrants tend to be quite reticent to self-identify, particularly to international organisations. Numbers are both under- and over-reported. They are under-reported because many people do not consider themselves migrants but instead see themselves as foreign students or expats, groups which are not always easy to count. In other instances, migrant numbers are over-reported because migrants frequently become naturalised but do not necessarily cease to be nationals of their country of origin (in particular in countries where dual nationality is permitted), leading them to be double-counted as both citizens and migrants (or randomly counted as one or the other). The problem is only aggravated when someone is counted as a migrant and then becomes naturalised. There are political and practical consequences in having control over the counting process. The politics of migrant counting can be seen in the tables of the UN’s World Population Division, which count over 75% of the population of certain Gulf countries as migrants. The practicality of counting concerns the range of funding possibilities open to countries which receive refugees and persons displaced by conflict. In such circumstances, counting entails access to resources from the international community.46 We are agnostic on the issue of what body is best placed to fulfil a mandate to collect and publish independent and viable statistics on migration and population. However, whatever body is given this job needs to be fully independent, properly funded and resourced and compliant with UN international standards on statistics. Bad statistics are worse than no statistics at all, as they can become the hostages of ideological battles. 46  The Danish Refugee Council raised the issue of Kenyan nationals living in the Dadaab refugee camp, which primarily houses Somali refugees in Kenya. The Danish Refugee Council estimated that 30% of the camp’s inhabitants were Kenyan nationals. As a result, biometric cards were issued to the refugees in the camp on the basis of which rations were given out. However, a negative externality of the exclusion of Kenyans from access to rations in the camp was a substantial diminution of national support for the camp and Somali refugees. The president’s decree in 2016 that the camp must be closed and the Somalis sent back to Somalia is also a reflection of the change of the composition of the camp. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nuek3So8QhUJ:www.alnap.org/pool/ files/socio-economic-environmental-impact-study-of-the-dadaab-refugee-camp-on-thehost-community.pdf+&cd=5&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl

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The remaining provisions of the Agreement cover institutional matters such as reciprocal representation at the UN and IOM Council meetings, the right to propose agenda items, exchange of information and documents (which appears to be obligatory but is limited by the extent practicable on both sides), administrative cooperation, expenses, confidentiality and so on. We must note that it is disappointing that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the confidentiality of UN-related bodies and organisations is subject to specific protection while transparency is not.

Conclusion Since its inception as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration and in the subsequent decades, the IOM has had an essentially operational focus—a ‘logistics agency’ outside the UN (Kuptsch and Martin 2011, 42). Although the scale and content of its operations expanded dramatically in the subsequent half century, its Constitution continues to define its purposes and functions as the organised transfer of refugees, the displaced and other persons, and to provide migration services at the request of states. Further, in carrying out its functions, the IOM shall conform to the laws, regulations and policies of the states concerned. Recent operational policies on human rights and protection, although a very positive step, have not changed the state-centric character of its governing documents. In its 2016 Agreement with the UN, the IOM undertook to conduct its activities in accordance with the Charter and ‘with due regard’ to human rights, but the organisation did not change its Constitution. In the IOM’s view, this does not create any conflict with the Agreement, which is a ‘reiteration’ of the IOM’s general practice to act in accordance with international law, including human rights law.47 We believe that there is a serious incompatibility between the IOM Constitution and the protection of migrants’ rights under international human rights law. All states which are members of the IOM have voluntarily undertaken to respect migrants’ rights through their ratification of international human rights treaties and are legally bound to respect these 47  ‘Art. 2(5) of the IOM-UN Agreement is … only a reiteration of IOM’s general practice to act in accordance with international law, including human rights law. There is no conflict between Article 1 3. of the IOM Constitution and Art. 2(5) of the IOM-UN Agreement.’ Email from IOM to Stefanie Grant, 29 November 2017.

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rights within the IOM. The opportunity to bring the IOM activity into conformity with the existing duties of its member states was lost when the IOM negotiated its admission to the UN as a related organisation. Without any change in the organisation’s governing Constitution, there is no obvious answer to the question of who monitors and ensures that the IOM activities are in compliance with international human rights law. This remains unfinished business for both the UN and IOM. Remedying this incongruity is of growing importance given the organisation’s probable future role in relation to the UN Global Compact on Migration.48 Whatever ‘institutional architecture’ is decided by the General Assembly for the Global Compact, the GA should require a revision of the IOM Constitution to provide a legal protection mandate. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Migrants has noted, this would allow the IOM to measure its policies and practices against a clear, binding normative framework and ensure that all projects funded by states and implemented by the IOM are consistent with that framework (Crepeau 2016, 117). Others have made similar points. There should be a legal protection mandate which is as clear as the mandate in the IOM Constitution to assist states in the management of migration (Martin 2014, 290). Even if it seeks to advance protection in the general sense, collateral to its field operations, the IOM has no mandate to protect or promote solutions, and no role in treaty supervision or in the development of migration law and standards. The Constitution specifically requires that it ‘shall recognize that control of standards of admission is within the domestic jurisdiction of states. The IOM thus lacks that standing in international law which would permit its direct engagement with states on the rights of the displaced’ (Goodwin-Gill 2016, 689). The New York Declaration makes clear that it is the intention of the General Assembly to mainstream human rights in the UN’s Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Protection of migrants’ rights is central to the Global Compact. Tensions between how states 48  One indication of how the IOM has seen this role can be found in its proposal to the UN Secretary General that a follow-up mechanism—which would include priority setting and progress review—could be based on the IOM Council and its subsidiary International Dialogue on Migration. See ‘IOM Input to Secretary General’s Report on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration’, September 2017, at https://www.iom. int/sites/default/files/our_work/ODG/GCM/Input1-IOM-Input-to-SG-ReportStructure-and-Elements.pdf

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define their sovereign interests and the human rights of migrants are inevitable. But the current IOM policies do not indicate how tensions or inconsistencies between a policy of ‘supportive’ migrant protection and the actions of states which breach migrants’ rights are to be resolved in the absence of a clear legal mandate.

Works Cited Achermann, A., J.  Künzli, and B. von Rütte. 2013. European Immigration Detention Rules Existing Standards. Working Paper, Schweizerisches Kompetenzzentrum für Menschenrechte and Centre de droit des migrations, Council of Europe, November 2013. At https://www.coe.int/t/democracy/ migration/Source/migration/Compilation%20of%20existing%20standards_eng.pdf Andrijasevic, R. 2006a. Lampedusa in Focus: Migrants Caught Between the Libyan Desert and the Deep Sea. Feminist Review 82 (1): 120–125. ———. 2006b. Renounced Responsibilities: Detention, Expulsion and Asylum at the EU’s Southern Border of Libya and Lampedusa. Open Society Institute, CPS International Policy Fellowship Program Working Paper. At http://policy.hu/studydocs/andrijasevic.pdf Andrijasevic, R., and W.  Walters. 2010. The International Organization for Migration and the International Government of Borders. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (6): 977–999. Aradau, Claudia. 2004. The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation of Human Trafficking. Millennium 33 (2): 251–277. Baldwin-Edwards, Martin. 2004. Albanian Emigration and the Greek Labour Market: Economic Symbiosis and Social Ambiguity. SEER: Journal for Labour and Social Affairs in Eastern Europe 7 (1): 51–65. Betts, A., ed. 2011. Global Migration Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonjour, S., and B.  De Hart. 2013. A Proper Wife, a Proper Marriage: Constructions of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in Dutch Family Migration Policy. European Journal of Women’s Studies 20 (1): 61–76. Brian, T., and F.  Laszco, eds. 2016. Fatal Journeys, Vol. 2: Identification and Tracing of Dead and Missing Migrants. Geneva: IOM. Brownlie, I. 1998. The Rule of Law in International Affairs: International Law at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Byrne, R., G.  Noll, and J.  Vedsted-Hansen, eds. 2002. New Asylum Countries? Migration Control and Refugee Protection in an Enlarged European Union. Leiden: Brill. Collyer, M. 2012. Deportation and the Micropolitics of Exclusion: The Rise of Removals from the UK to Sri Lanka. Geopolitics 17 (2): 276–292.

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Crepeau, F. 2016. Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. A/71/285. August 2016. De Haas, H. 2009. Mobility and Human Development. UNDP, Human Development Research Paper 2009/01. At http://hdr.undp.org/sites/ default/files/hdrp_2009_01_rev.pdf Ducasse-Rogier, M. 2001. International Organisation for Migration 1951–2001. Geneva: IOM. Düvell, F. 2011. Irregular Migration. In Global Migration Governance, ed. A. Betts, 78–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fekete, L. 2011. Accelerated Removals: The Human Cost of EU Deportation Policies. Race & Class 52 (4): 89–97. Frelick, B. 2009. Pushed Back, Pushed Around: Italy’s Forced Return of Boat Migrants and Asylum Seekers, Libya’s Mistreatment of Migrants and Asylum Seekers. New York: Human Rights Watch. Ghosh, B. 2012. A Snapshot of Reflections on Migration Management: Is Migration Management a Dirty Word? In The New Politics of International Mobility: Migration Management and Its Discontents, ed. M.  Geiger and A. Pécoud, 25–30. Osnabrück: IMIS-Beiträge. Goodwin-Gill, G. 2016. The Movements of People Between States in the 21st Century: An Agenda for Urgent Institutional Change. International Journal of Refugee Law 28 (4): 679–694. Guild, E. 2016. BREXIT and Its Consequences for UK and EU Citizenship or Monstrous Citizenship. The Hague: Martin Nijhoff. Guild, E., and S.  Grant. 2017. Migration Governance in the UN: What Is the Global Compact and What Does It Mean? Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 252. Available at https://ssrn.com/ abstract=2895636 Guild, E., S. Grant, and K. Goroenendijk. 2017. IOM and the UN: Unfinished Business. Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 255. Available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2927414 Kalir, B., and L.  Wissink. 2016. The Deportation Continuum: Convergences Between State Agents and NGO Workers in the Dutch Deportation Field. Citizenship Studies 20 (1): 34–49. Klugman, J. 2009. Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development. New York: UNDP. Kuptsch, C., and P.  Martin. 2011. Low Skilled Labour Migration. In Global Migration Governance, ed. A. Betts, 35–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lauterpacht, H. 1936. The Covenant as the “Higher Law”. British Year Book of International Law 17: 54–65. Lietaert, I., E.  Broekaert, and I.  Derluyn. 2016. From Social Instrument to Migration Management Tool: Assisted Voluntary Return Programmes – The Case of Belgium. Social Policy & Administration 51 (7): 961–980.

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Lutz, H., and E. Palenga-Möllenbeck. 2010. Care Work Migration in Germany: Semi-Compliance and Complicity. Social Policy and Society 9 (3): 419–430. Martin, S. 2010. Climate Change, Migration, and Governance. Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 16 (3): 397–414. ———. 2014. International Migration: Evolving Trends from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pattenden, R. 2006. Admissibility in Criminal Proceedings of Third Party and Real Evidence Obtained by Methods Prohibited by UNCAT. International Journal of Evidence & Proof 10 (1): 1–41. Pécoud, A., and P.  De Guchteneire. 2006. International Migration, Border Controls and Human Rights: Assessing the Relevance of a Right to Mobility. Journal of Borderlands Studies 21 (1): 69–86. Perruchoud, R. 1992. Persons Falling Under the Mandate of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and to Whom the Organization May Provide Migration Services. International Journal of Refugee Law 4: 205–215. Rahel, K., and H. Schwenken. 2014. Migrantinnen als Hoffnungsträgerinnen in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit? Geschlechterspezifische Subjektivitäten im migration-development nexus. Politische Vierteljahresschrrift 48: 328–356. Sitaropoulos, N. 2006. The Role and Limits of the European Court of Human Rights in Supervising State Security and Anti-terrorism Measures Affecting Aliens’ Rights. In Terrorism and the Foreigner: A Decade of Tension Around the Rule of Law in Europe, ed. E. Guild and A. Baldaccini, 85–120. Leiden: Brill. Stančová, K. 2010. Assisted Voluntary Return of Irregular Migrants: Policy and Practice in the Slovak Republic. International Migration 48 (4): 186–200. Venturas, Lina, ed. 2015. International Migration Management in the Early Cold War: The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. Corinth: University of the Peloponnese. Webber, F. 2011. How Voluntary Are Voluntary Returns? Race & Class 52 (4): 98–107.

International Organization

for

Migration

‘Draft Report of the First Special Session of the Council’. C/Sp/1/14/Rev.1. 13 September 2017. IOM-UN Relations, Resolution No. 1309, Adopted 24 November 2015. ‘IOM Migration Governance Framework’. C/106/40. 4 November 2015. ‘IOM Policy on Protection’. C/106/INF/9. 7 September 2015. IOM.  2009.  https://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/ microsites/IDM/workshops/human-rights-migration-november-2009/ MC-INF-298-The-Human-Rights-of-Migrants-IOM-Policy-and-Activities.pdf

CHAPTER 3

Gendering Migration Management Rianne Mahon

Introduction The International Organization for Migration (IOM) formally adopted the principle of gender mainstreaming at the same time as it embraced its new mandate in Toward the 21st Century (MC/1842, 1995). The IOM is by no means alone in taking up the idea of integrating gender equality and women’s empowerment into its operations (Miller and Razavi 1998; Meyer and Prügl 1999; Rai and Waylen 2008; Bedford 2009; Caglar et al. 2013). The literature on the gendering of international organisations highlights the fluid and contested nature of gender equality as a global norm enshrined in international organisations (Krook and True 2012; Zwingel 2013). It also underlines the formidable challenges ‘femocrats’

Research for this chapter was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the partnership grant on Gender Migration and the Work of Care. I benefited from research assistance of Masaya Llavaneras-­ Blanco and Sara Rose Taylor. Any errors or misunderstandings however are mine alone. R. Mahon (*) Balsillie School of International Affairs and Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 M. Geiger, A. Pécoud (eds.), The International Organization for Migration, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1_3

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operating inside international organisations face in the form of ‘resistant organisational cultures; tenacious institutional routines and cognitive frameworks that counteract the integration of gender equality demands’ (Caglar et al. 2013, 11).1 There are no such studies, however, of the incorporation of gender in the IOM. The UN ‘decade for women’ (1975–1985) and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing helped put gender equality on the global agenda. It also helped make the IOM aware of the discourse on the ‘feminisation of migration’—that is, that women, who constitute roughly half of the world’s migrants, were increasingly migrating not as dependent family members but independently.2 In 1995 the IOM thus moved to establish a Working Group on Gender Initiatives (WGGI) with the dual mandate of ‘ensuring the particular needs of all migrant women are taken into account’ (IOM CRP/22 2006, 1) in its projects and promoting gender balance in staffing. This chapter examines the process of ‘gendering’ the IOM’s migration management discourse, focusing on the first part of this mandate. Particular attention is paid to the IOM’s understanding of transnational care chains. While migrant women find work in a variety of areas, they predominate in care work. The concept of transnational care chains was developed to draw attention to the forces shaping the demand for migrants (usually women) to do care work in host countries, the impetus to migrate and the care arrangements (or lack thereof) for those ‘left behind’. The formation of transnational care chains thus raises issues that cannot adequately be dealt with at the national scale—issues of the sort that the IOM seems well positioned to tackle. Yet while it has done a better job of ‘seeing’ all the links of the chain than other international organisations, the IOM’s discourse on migrant women workers’ rights more often takes a back seat to anti-trafficking initiatives, which sit more comfortably with its commitment to migration management (Basok and Piper 2012).3 This bias is reinforced 1  The term ‘femocrat’ originated in Australia during the 1970s when numerous feminists were recruited into middle- and senior-level positions of government to advance women’s equality (Sawer 1990, 22). The term is now used to refer to those recruited into official positions because of their expertise on gender equality issues. 2  I am not claiming that the migration of women is a new phenomenon (see Schrover 2013 on earlier movements). Rather, I am referring to the ‘discovery’ of women as migrant workers that began in the 1990s (Mahon 2018). 3  See Mahon and Michel (2017) on the ILO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Mahon (2018) on the OECD and the World Bank.

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by the IOM’s decentralised structure and project-focused financing, which have made it more difficult to translate insights from the Gender Coordinating Unit at headquarters into practices on the ground. The first section of this chapter briefly outlines the analytical framework that draws on the constructivist approach to international relations. The more dynamic concept of ‘organisational discourse’ is used instead of Barnett and Finnemore’s (1998) concept of bureaucratic culture. In order to situate the IOM within its broader field, I draw on Pécoud’s concept of international migration narrative (Pécoud 2015). The second section examines the work of the IOM’s Gender Coordinating Unit and its place within the wider organisation, highlighting the particular problems which the IOM’s decentralised, project-focused culture poses for the gender experts at the Geneva headquarters. The third section focuses on how the IOM has treated transnational care chains, noting that while the gender unit has commissioned some excellent research on care chains, this understanding has not filtered down to field offices. The final section focuses on the IOM’s evolving relationship with the UN as this pertains to gender mainstreaming.

IOs as Embedded Organisations International organisations (IOs) like the IOM are not by any means the only actors engaged in weaving together the various strands that constitute a system of transnational governance in and across various fields. Nevertheless, IOs typically occupy a privileged position in forging the transnational policy networks through which their definitions of shared problems and the range of ‘best practice’ solutions are diffused. How, then, to study an IO? Eschewing a state-centric perspective, Barnett and Finnemore (1998) argue that IOs are relatively autonomous organisations with distinctive bureaucratic cultures that shape how they see the world and how they relate to the beneficiaries of their actions. IOs also have the power to fix the ‘boundaries of acceptable action’ (712) and play an important role in diffusing global norms. The IOM has certainly become involved in shaping contemporary international migration narratives (Pécoud 2015). Barnett and Finnemore’s otherwise insightful concept of ‘bureaucratic culture’, however, fails to identify how emerging challenges force IOs to develop new (or at least revised) ways of seeing the world. The concept of ‘organisational discourse’—‘claims encapsulating long term political projects as

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defined by the organization in question’ (Dostal 2004, 445; Mahon 2011)—more sharply brings into focus how new key projects chart new directions for the work of an IO and reshape how it sees the world. IOs often have more than one organisational discourse, however. As bureaucracies, they ‘factor’ problems into manageable pieces. As a result, different segments of the organization may develop different ways of making sense of the world, experience different local environments, and receive different stimuli from outside; they may also be populated by different mixes of profession or shaped by different historical experiences. All of these would contribute to the development of different local cultures within the organization and different ways of perceiving the environment and the organization’s overall mission. (Barnett and Finnemore 1998, 24)

For example, the unit in charge of gender is likely to develop a feminist-­ inspired discourse, which may (or may not) influence how other parts of the IO see the world. At the same time, the dominant discourse within the organisation is likely to affect the claims its femocrats articulate. As various authors have shown, gender experts who are trying to ‘make the case’ in an IO have to translate that message into terms fitting the dominant discourse, which often leads to different than intended results. Miller’s classic study of incorporating gender into the development discourses of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) shows that internal advocates were at best able to ‘serve as mediators, translating feminist concerns and demands into issues and language that have legitimacy within the institutional context’ (1998, 170). Bedford’s (2009) pathbreaking study of gendering the World Bank’s discourse documents the way the struggle to be heard within the organisation distorted the gender equality discourse, leading, inter alia, to the demonisation of men from the South. In addition to organisational discourses, it is important to consider an IO’s structure. While Barnett and Finnemore’s conception of IOs as bureaucracies applies fairly well to more centralised organisations like the World Bank, it is ‘difficult to apply to IOs that are not only driven by the bureaucracy at headquarters locations, but also proactively forecast and rapidly respond to local developments or environments through field and regional offices’ (Geiger and Koch 2018, 4). As is argued later, the IOM’s decentralised organisational structure has posed particular challenges for the gender unit at headquarters.

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Finally, it is important to locate IOs within the wider field(s) within which they operate. Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson’s (2006) conception of field, which comprises spatial, relational and cultural/discursive dimensions, may help. In terms of the first, ‘spatial topographies in fields of transnational governance look like … kaleidoscopes. They are fragmented rather than unified; a juxtaposition of multiple sub-topographies that collide and sometimes overlap. … They are highly fluid and constantly evolving’ (2006, 22). This nicely captures the state of the field of international migration, which, as Kalm notes, ‘displays a complex pattern of agents and forums that operate at and between the national, regional and global levels, with sometimes overlapping goals and mandates’ (2012, 21). The IOM is one of several IOs, most notably the ILO and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), whose mandate focuses on migration. Until recently, the IOM was ‘not part of the UN system and not legitimized or mandated by international law’ (Georgi 2012, 47). Its new status as a ‘related’ organisation of the UN may signal a move to give it the core position within the field, but concerns remain about its ability to make human rights, which are so central to UN agencies, part of its mandate (see the chapter by Guild et al. in this book). Fields are also ‘battlefields’, that is, ‘systems of relationships and resources where dominant actors occupy central positions whilst peripheral actors continually seek greater influence and a more central position’ (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006, 20). An important part of that struggle is discursive: ‘what are and/or what will be the structuring frames of meaning and action, the dominant frames and understandings in the field’ (20). In this respect, international migration narratives—‘a relatively coherent body of knowledge and ideas, regarding both what migration is … and what it should be’ (Pécoud 2015, 3)—have come to play an important ‘federating’ role in the migration field by attempting to ‘make sense of the apparently chaotic and threatening nature of migration dynamics’ by proposing ‘categories to think about human mobility and [to] govern it’ (5). Migration management is clearly one of the narratives that has come to dominate the migration field (Geiger and Pécoud 2012). Bimal Ghosh’s report for the UN’s Commission on Global Governance (1993–1997) had a major impact on the discursive battlefield by articulating a vision for a New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People centred on the principle of ‘managed migration’. Initially supported by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland,

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the IOM came to make this central to its new organisational discourse. In fact, Ghosh’s conception fit well with the organisational discourse first articulated in IOM Strategic Planning: Toward the Twenty-First Century (MC/1842 1995), which committed the IOM to the principle of humane and orderly migration as beneficial to destination countries seeking to meet (temporary) labour market needs, to the development of the countries of origin and to the well-being of migrants themselves. There is a gender dimension to the managed migration narrative. Women’s migration is depicted as a win-win situation. At the individual level, Southern women escape patriarchal attitudes at home and earn higher wages abroad, while women in wealthy countries are freed up to take productive jobs in line with their educational backgrounds. At the national level, poor countries increase their foreign exchange balance and benefit from the ‘modern’ ideas brought by the diaspora, while wealthy countries fill labour market shortages with low-cost temporary workers who will return to their country of origin (women are seen as committed to their families and hence likely to return home).4 This narrative, inter alia, perpetuates the international trade in domestic care services and does nothing to challenge the unequal relations on which this trade is based. As Pécoud (2015) argues, an alternative narrative might argue that ‘unattractive’ jobs could be made more attractive by higher wages or better work conditions, which would benefit those who occupy them (whether migrant or national). The notion that certain jobs are only for women is problematic, and one could challenge the logic according to which women’s access to the labour market requires the recruitment of foreign caregivers. One could also point to the social or psychological costs of the mobility of these ‘servants of globalisation’ (119). As we shall see, the discourse developed by the IOM’s gender unit has picked up elements of an alternative narrative for migrant care workers, but, for the most part, this has not been picked up in the field offices. The key points, then, are as follows. It is important to locate how an IO—in this case, the IOM—sees the world by examining its organisational discourse(s). The latter are likely to be plural but with a dominant one— for the IOM, managed migration—that may cut across all parts of the organisation. Gender mainstreaming is supposed to result in the insertion of gender equality in the dominant discourse, but the extent to which this 4  See, for instance, Mahon and Michel (2017) and Mahon (2018) on the way these narratives appear in the discourse of the ILO, the World Bank and the OECD.

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has succeeded and the ways in which gender equality has had to be translated into terms that fit the dominant discourse are addressed later. Second, the organisation’s structure needs to be taken into account. This is especially important for decentralised organisations like the IOM.  In fact, while the IOM’s headquarters houses units dedicated to developing organisational discourses, including the Gender Coordinating Unit, the field offices occupy a particularly critical position. Finally, it is important to situate the IOM’s discourse in relation to dominant migration narratives.

Making Gender Part of the IOM’s Mandate The IOM has established itself in a central position within the field of international migration. Its core organisational discourse is that of migration management. Its version of migration management, however, is situated somewhere between the rights-oriented discourse of the ILO and the neoliberal version articulated by the World Bank (Basok and Piper 2012, 37). The introduction of rights elements into the IOM’s discourse in the 1990s helped create a space within the organisation for the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Yet those charged with advancing gender mainstreaming in the IOM have adapted their discourse to fit the organisation. Those in the field favour the managerial view that ‘the plight of migrant women is predominantly dealt with through the trafficking lens, and their labor rights remain largely unaddressed’ (53). This chapter does not attempt to replicate Basok and Piper’s pathbreaking study for other regions but rather to illuminate how gender equality has been interpreted within the IOM.5 Gender equality and gender mainstreaming were put on the global agenda by the Fourth UN Conference for Women, held in Beijing in 1995, which occurred when there was growing awareness of the ‘feminisation of migration’—data showed that that women constituted nearly half the flow of migrants, not only as family members but also on their own. That same year, while the IOM was adopting its strategic planning orientation for the twenty-first century, it also established a Working Group on 5  For this study, I have drawn on documentary evidence from the IOM. In addition to the annual reports for the IOM’s Council, these include the 1998 document on gender mainstreaming, the 2006 Evaluation of Gender Mainstreaming in the IOM, the IOM Gender Equality Policy 2015–2019, several key research reports commissioned by the Gender Unit, annual World Migration Reports and other Council documents.

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Gender Issues (WGGI) which was tasked with developing guiding gender principles. In November 1995 the Council adopted ‘equal opportunity and treatment of men and women’ as one of its guiding principles (IOM 1998, 6) and approved a plan of action on gender issues. In 1997 it appointed a gender issues coordinator with the following mandate: to foster a positive awareness of gender policies throughout the Organization, ensure that programmes are in line with IOM gender policies, provide advice to senior managers on gender policy and support the elaboration of proposals for programmes to address the particular gender-related needs of migrants. (6)

As WGGI was a headquarters-based network, some 35 ‘gender focal points’ (GFPs) were established to reach into the field; these GFPs were asked to devote 5–10 per cent of their time to gender mainstreaming. When the original coordinator left the IOM in 2000, overall responsibility was transferred to then-Deputy Director General, Ndioro Ndiaye, who was assisted by a part-time ‘Gender Officer/Head of WGGI’. Ndiaye, who had previously served as Minister for Women’s, Children’s and Family Affairs in Senegal and thus had ‘had broad experience and interest in gender’ (IOM CRP/22 2006, 10), was able to secure funding for gender-­ specific projects from the IOM’s Discretionary Income.6 These projects were to serve as models for the GFPs and other officers in the field seeking to incorporate gender. Following the 2006 gender mainstreaming audit, the WGGI was abolished and in its place a Gender Coordinating Unit, staffed by a full-time officer, was established within the Office of the Director General. These initiatives need to be seen in relation to global developments. The four Conferences for Women (1975–1995) constituted a critical site for the creation of a gender equality field. Those UN organisations with a gender equality mandate, which merged to form UN Women in 2010, collectively continue to hold the central IO position within the gender equality field.7 In this respect, the IOM is clearly a follower: 6  The report also noted that ‘the former Deputy-Director (1994–1999) [Natalia Escala] already played a leading role in the development and implementation of IOM’s new gender policy strategy’ (10). 7  On gender strategies within the UN, see Hannan (2013).

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While not part of the UN system, IOM definitions on gender and gender mainstreaming and major decisions on the policy and strategies closely follow the trends and recommendations made by ECOSOC …, by international conferences … and by other key partners of the UN system, in particular UNFPA and UNIFEM. (IOM CRP/22 2006, i)

Following the UN’s lead, the IOM adopted a rights-based gender equality discourse and officially recognised that gender intersects with ‘other important criteria for socio-cultural analysis including class, race, poverty level, ethnic group and age’ (IOM CRP/22 2006, 5). More recently, this has been expanded to include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual persons (IOM CRP/42 2013, 4). The UN also developed the idea of gender focal points that the IOM later adopted. What the IOM could bring to the field was its expertise in migration. In so doing, the IOM femocrats drew on feminist knowledge that fit with, while also expanding, the IOM’s conception of ‘safe, humane and orderly migration … of benefit to all’ (IOM C/106 2015, 1). This discourse contains an embedded tension in its attempt to simultaneously support the rights of migrants (women and men) and state interests (especially destination states) in controlling access to suit labour market needs and security concerns, as well as traditional gender norms. One of the ways to reconcile the two is to focus on trafficking. There is widespread support for the international trafficking framework (Kneebone 2010, 384), which fits the managed migration narrative as trafficking is a particularly pernicious form of ‘irregular’ migration that exploits migrants while undermining state capacities to control migration. Not surprisingly, a considerable share of the IOM’s gender-related activity has focused on anti-trafficking. Of the first five ‘model projects’ sponsored by WGGI, three dealt with trafficking, one with HIV/AIDS and one with migrant domestic workers (IOM CRP 82nd session 2001, Annex 1). When the 2003 World Migration Report listed the range of the IOM activities focused on migrant women, it concluded by noting that the ‘IOM’s most pioneering work is in the area of counter-trafficking’ (2003, 8). Several years later, the evaluation of gender mainstreaming carried out by the IOM Inspector General criticised the organisation’s tendency to conflate gender-sensitive programming and anti-trafficking activities (IOM CRP/22 2006, 2, 23).

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The major report Working to Prevent and Address Violence Against Women Migrant Workers (2009a) discussed a number of anti-trafficking projects, including one in Thailand that nicely illustrates the uneasy union of gender equality and ‘migration management’. The project involved training Royal Thai Police and Immigration Detention Centre officials to identify victims of trafficking and a one-day training session for these detainees providing information on ‘safe migration and trafficking, legal channels to enter and work in Thailand and basic rights of migrant workers’ as well as assisted ‘voluntary’ return (29). The report articulated a broad definition of trafficking: The Organization believes that treating trafficking in isolation and only from the angle of transnational crime runs the risk of diverting attention from the broader issue of exploitation of migrant workers. IOM is currently in the process of broadening its approach to include not only victims of trafficking, but also exploited migrants who may not have necessarily been trafficked. This approach stems from the difficulties inherent in the identification of victims of trafficking as well as the increasing numbers of migrant workers in need of assistance but who do not meet the strict definition set forth by the UN Trafficking Protocol. Migrant women are particularly vulnerable to trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation. (37)

While this broader definition offers a more nuanced understanding, it does little to combat the tendency to reduce ‘gender-sensitive programming’ to anti-trafficking measures. Counter-trafficking is by no means the only gender-marked area the IOM has dealt with. In the early 2000s, it focused on female genital mutilation due to its impact on the health of migrant women. Since 2011, moreover, the IOM has devoted considerable resources to the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA). Accordingly, the IOM administered a ‘mandatory sensitization programme’ for staff and developed a ‘risk assessment workshop’ for managers in charge of resettlement programmes. Interestingly, Chiefs of Mission and Heads of Office have been made PSEA focal points, conveying the importance of this activity. In addition, the Director General has assumed the position of Inter-Agency Standing Committee Principal focal point on PSEA.

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The IOM and Transnational Care Chains Like anti-trafficking, PSEA is an important issue for migrant women, especially those in refugee camps or awaiting ‘voluntary’ resettlement. The majority of women migrating independently, however, are migrant workers. Many are migrating for temporary work and many have had to leave behind dependent family members, both young and old, creating transnational care chains.8 How does the IOM see their concerns and what has it been doing for them? As noted earlier, the gendered version of the migration management narrative represents women’s migration as an opportunity to escape traditional (patriarchal) gender norms. The wages female migrants earn and the remittances they send are also seen as an important route to their empowerment. At the same time, a moralist undertone often surfaces, reflecting the concern that women’s migration— but not men’s—necessarily harms the children left behind.9 These themes appear in the IOM documents, even though the gender unit has articulated a more critical perspective. Several studies commissioned by the IOM illuminate the economic pressures behind women’s decision to migrate. In her overview to Gender and Labour Migration in Asia, Piper notes that ‘the feminization of migration from certain countries is often an indicator for rising men’s un- or underemployment in the origin communities and also overseas, related to changing demand structures in labour markets’ (2009, 24). A joint report produced by the IOM and United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) for the Global Forum on Migration and Development roundtable, Uncovering the interfaces between gender, family migration and development: the global care economy and chains, argued that a review of the gender impact of macroeconomic and trade policies was needed and that structural adjustment policies meant that women ‘have to seek work outside their countries, due to increased poverty, insecurity of livelihoods and increasing work burdens in unregulated markets’ (IOM/UNIFEM 2010, 2). 8  This is not meant to suggest that all women migrant workers are employed in care work or that all women migrants leave behind young children or ageing parents. In areas like the Asia-Pacific, however, migrant domestic workers make up nearly one in five of all migrant workers in the region (ILO 2015, 16). The majority of these are women. 9  For instance, this is the dominant view within the World Bank and the OECD’s Development Centre (Mahon 2018).

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From the outset, the IOM gender unit noted that migrant women face double discrimination in labour markets as women and as foreigners. They are frequently confined to marginal, low-wage jobs, often in the informal sector, and find it particularly hard to reconcile the demands of paid work with family duties (IOM 1998, 10). One of the first model gender projects funded was an information campaign aimed at employers and domestic workers in San Jose, Costa Rica, which outlined labour and social security rights and obligations and the procedures required by the Ministry of Labour to regularise domestic work. The study was presented at a workshop (jointly sponsored by the IOM Office, the ILO and ASTRA DOMES, an Association of Domestic Workers) promoting the labour rights of women migrants from Nicaragua (IOM CRP 82nd Session 2001, 8). In addition to a study of migrant women workers in Asia (2009b), the unit also sponsored Crushed Hopes (2012), a 2012 study documenting the de-­skilling of many migrant women. The chapter on the UK by Sandra Cuban in that volume underlined how in destination countries underfunding of care services combined with systemic racism to block the recognition of the credentials of nurses trained in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. At the project level, the IOM’s practice is more in line with migration management. It has engaged in pre-departure information campaigns, language and cultural orientation training, has established Migrant Resource Centres and has occasionally, at the request of sending governments (Sri Lanka and Bangladesh), provided training in domestic service. Such projects may improve the situation for some migrant women but, for the most part, do nothing to challenge the underlying structures that shape their position within host labour markets. As Piper notes: restrictive migration policies … as well as the prevalence of temporary contract schemes, in combination with many migrant women’s economic and social contribution being undervalued and their work often legally unrecognized, posed serious limitations to women migrants’ changes for personal socioeconomic empowerment. (2009, 294)

What of the other end of transnational care chains, those ‘left behind’? Here again, studies commissioned by the Gender Unit challenge the view upheld in international migration narratives. The gender unit has recognised that women’s migration renders it particularly difficult to reconcile work and family life even while migrants were providing care services for

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families in destination countries. The 2008 World Migration Report ­recognised the existence of care chains and their potential implications for those left to take care of children (and the elderly) in countries of origin (11).10 A study by the then-gender coordinator, Lopez-Ekra, and her collaborators of gender and remittances noted the potentially negative implications for the ‘substitute carers’ but went on to point out that the debate is not exempt from alarmist overstatements rooted in ideological biases about women’s reproductive roles and responsibilities. … Growing up in the absence of a mother certainly takes an important toll on the children, but so does the want of a father model. (2011, 96)

Other studies, like the 2012 one on transnational families conducted and funded by the IOM, note that ‘no generalizations are possible, as the social impact depends on different factors, such as social class, gender and access to legal entry, cultural practices, the integration into the global economy, political changes and geographic differences’ (Meld 2012, 5). Piper’s overview for the Asian study went further: what seems to be required … is a more detailed study looking into dominant socio-cultural discourses, including religious ones, in addition to looking at changing parental dynamics over time. There seems to be evidence that more and more men are taking a stronger parental role. Specific policies supporting the left-behind parents might also determine the outcome of a parent’s migration on a child. (2009, 33)

The 2010 joint background paper similarly signalled the importance of providing support to men to assume domestic work and child care responsibilities, in addition to government (and donor)-financed support for care services. In contrast to studies like the World Bank’s, which demonised men of the South (Mahon 2018), at least some IOM documents offer a more nuanced view of men and their capacities as parents. While the paper prepared for the 2014 International Dialogue on Migration reiterated the narrative that children feel abandoned when mothers migrated, while ‘fathers remaining at home … cannot easily fulfil the traditional role that mothers assume’ (IOM/IDM 2014, 92), it did raise the point that ‘family reunification strengthens migrants’ contribution 10  Along with the 2003 and 2005 reports, this was one of the better reports with regard to incorporating gender into its analysis.

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to development by increasing their well-being, promoting personal development and improving their social integration’ (83). This is an important argument: children are left behind because of policies that favour temporary migration and make family reunification, not to mention the possibility of full citizenship for migrants, difficult.

The IOM, the UN and Gender Mainstreaming To some extent, it is easier for those based in the IOM’s Geneva headquarters, who are located close to various UN agencies, to focus on the rights aspect.11 It is therefore not surprising that some of the IOM’s strongest gender equality initiatives have been made in collaboration with UN agencies. The 2006 Forum Female Migration: Bridging the Gaps Throughout the Life Cycle outlined an agenda for change, including the possibility of a joint task force to carry the agenda forward. The IOM has also collaborated with UN agencies in support of the rights of domestic workers.12 Perhaps one of the most important developments is the IOM’s participation in the UN System-Wide Action Plan for Implementation of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (SWAP), which began in 2012, before the IOM officially became part of the UN system. SWAP was designed to strengthen the accountability and competence in gender equality issues of UN staff at all levels through the use of indicators to monitor and evaluate performance using peer review and gender audits. The IOM’s participation in SWAP is especially important for engaging the GFPs, as SWAP is designed to reach not only those at UN headquarters but also in Country Teams (UN 2012). The first audit of the IOM’s gender programme noted that in a decentralised organisation like the IOM responsibility for implementing activities is left to the field, which means that ‘there is no central accountability for the performance and achievements in implementing gender policy and strategy’ (IOM CRP/22 2006, 12). While some important initiatives 11  The IOM Gender Coordinating Unit is an active member of the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality as well as the informal network of Geneva-based UN gender advisors (IOM CRP/36 2011, 3). 12  Some examples are its 2009 participation in a day of general discussion of migrant domestic workers, the 2011 support documentation on domestic workers for the regional (Jamaican) Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) meeting with UN Women and participation in the joint UN Women-EU dialogue on domestic workers on International Women’s day that same year.

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have been taken, like the collaboration of five IOM offices in an important study on migrant women workers in Asia (2009b), gender policy and strategy ‘varies between offices, depending on various factors, such as opportunities for implementing gender-related activities, interest from heads of office, external financial support or partnership’ (11–12). While terms of references (TORs) exist for the GFPs, ‘these are neither exhaustive nor mandatory’ (11). Moreover, some offices have not even appointed a GFP, there being no penalty for failing to do so. After this report, the Unit developed a plan to strengthen the network by revising the TOR and requiring biannual reports and developing 11 fact sheets (IOM CRP/26 2008). Yet while there were 143 GFPs in 90 countries two years later, only 25 per cent had complied with the request to provide regular reports on their activities (IOM CRP/31 2010). A review of project proposals showed that only 5 per cent met gender mainstreaming standards while 70 per cent did not adequately address gender issues. The IOM was one of eight agencies that participated in the pilot SWAP study in 2012. The IOM had agreed to meet or exceed SWAP standards (IOM C/105/CRP/21 2014). Following the review, the IOM contracted a SWAP expert to develop a plan of action. One of the key aims was to reform the GFP network. The Director General subsequently ‘approved a reform creating minimum qualification for GFPs and created a system of Regional GFPs to assist and work with GFPs in their region’ (ibid.). The new gender equality plan for 2015–2019 was even more explicit: Depending on resource availability, the Director General will appoint GFPs from staff employed at P3 or National Officer C (NO-C) levels and above, recognizing that IOM’s presence worldwide and unique structure require flexibility. Gender focal points should have gender-related knowledge or experience. They will have written terms of reference and allocate a minimum of 10 percent of working time to the gender focal point role. Each Regional and Country Office and Headquarters Department will have at least on gender focal point. At Regional Offices, a thematic specialist or regional project development officer will be appointed as the gender focal point. The gender focal point role will be included in the regular Staff Evaluation System cycles. The Gender Coordination Unit will establish an online network to ensure communication between gender focal points and monitor implementation of gender focal point work plans. The Unit will also coordinate an annual virtual meeting of gender focal points by region. (IOM C/106/INF/Rev.1 2015, Annex 6–7)

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Participating in SWAP while a new relationship between the IOM and the UN was being worked out has helped strengthen the IOM’s GFP network. Yet the first sentence in the above quote serves as a reminder that the IOM works on the basis of project funding: there is no guarantee that these commitments will be fulfilled in the absence of donor funding for such projects. To be sure, each Regional and Country Office is to have a GFP, although the gender GFPs do not have the power accorded the GFPs for counter-trafficking. Moreover, according to the new TOR, management is encouraged, but not required, to include the GFP’s contribution to gender activities in the performance evaluation; furthermore, prior gender-related knowledge or experience is not a requirement for the post. In addition, an annual work plan incorporating gender and an annual report on ‘gender-sensitive’ activities are prepared only ‘where feasible’. In other words, the Gender Coordinating Unit, which consists of two persons based in Geneva, continues to face significant challenges in performing its ‘catalytic’ role. SWAP may help them to strengthen their case, especially now that the IOM is officially part of the UN system. As part of SWAP, local GFPs can also look to their counterparts in UN Country Offices for support to move things forward. Yet the Unit can at best work to elicit the support of GFPs and do its best to help them influence the work of the Regional and Country Offices.

Conclusions As this chapter has documented for the first time, the IOM has moved to develop a gender equality lens over the course of the last two decades. Its adoption of such a lens represents an important move. Women comprise nearly half the world’s migrants and, as the IOM recognises, gender shapes a migrant’s experience: Gender influences the reasons for migrating, who migrates and to where, how people migrate and the networks they use, opportunities and resources available at destination, and relations with country of origin. Risks, vulnerabilities and needs are also shaped in large part by one’s gender, and often vary drastically for different groups. (IOM C/106/INF/8/Rev.1 2015, 3)

The gender experts charged with making the IOM aware of the gender dimensions of migration, however, have had to adapt their discourse to the IOM’s dominant discourse of ‘migration management’. Among other things, this has led to a focus on trafficking at the expense of other key

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issues, like transnational care chains. This is not to say that the IOM has ignored these other issues. Gender experts at headquarters have commissioned a number of excellent studies that expose the various dimensions of care chains and do so in ways that break with the gendered international migration narrative. In this sense, the IOM has done better than other IOs like the World Bank and even the ILO (Mahon and Michel 2017; Mahon 2018). Yet, as we have seen, the IOM tends to find it easier to take up problems associated with trafficking or the vulnerability of women and girls in refugee camps to sexual exploitation and abuse because these fit with its dominant organisational discourse on promoting ‘good’ (legal) migration while combating ‘bad’ (irregular) migration. Moreover, while the IOM’s decentralised structure gives it the potential to develop a contextualised analysis of gender relations, it also has posed a challenge for the gender equality experts at headquarters aiming to get their message and their priorities adopted in field offices. Whether and how the IOM thinks about gender has become all the more important as it now occupies a central position within the migration field and has become affiliated with the UN. Other IOs, both within and outside the UN system, may take up migration-related issues and some, particularly UN Women, may have a more deeply embedded commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment. Yet as the IO steadily focused on migration, the IOM is in a leading position to shape the development of the UN Global Migration Compact.13 There are real concerns that the managerial elements of its discourse will continue to prevail over the human rights of all migrants, as can be seen in the New York Declaration of 2016, which promoted ‘orderly, safe, and regular’ migration combined with policing irregular migration. Thus, as Guild et al. note in this volume, it remains uncertain whether the primacy given to national laws and the lack of any reference to international law or human rights in the IOM Constitution are compatible with the substantial role assigned to the organisation in the development of the Global Migration Compact which the United Nations General Assembly has determined is a human rights project.

13  The IOM was appointed to service the negotiations, along with the UN Secretariat. It has also been given responsibility for coordinating the regional consultations with civil society groups.

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Miller, Carol. 1998. Gender Advocates and Multilateral Development Organizations: Promoting Change from within. In Missionaries and Mandarins: Feminist Engagement with Development Institutions, ed. C. Miller and S. Razavi, 9–20. Geneva: UNRISD. Pécoud, Antoine. 2015. Depoliticising Migration: Global Governance and International Migration Narratives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Piper, Nicola. 2009. ‘Overview’ and ‘Conclusion’. In Gender and Labour Migration in Asia, 21–42 and 293–297. Geneva: IOM. Rai, Shirin M., and Georgina Waylen, eds. 2008. Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sawer, Marion. 1990. Sisters in Suits: Women and Public Policy in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Schrover, Marlou. 2013. Feminization and Problematization of Migration; Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migration: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. D. Hoerder and A. Kaur, 103–131. Leiden: Brill. UN. 2012. Un System-Wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. https://undg.org/document/un-system-wide-action-planon-genderequality-and-the-empowerment-of-women/ UNFPA/IOM. 2006. Female Migration: Bridging the Gaps Throughout the Life Cycle: Selected Papers of the UNFPA-IOM Expert Group Meeting New York 2–3 May 2006. New York: UNFPA/IOM. Zwingel, Susanne. 2013. ‘Translating International women’s Rights Norms: CEDAW in Context’. In Feminist Strategies in International Governance, ed. Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel. London: Routledge, pp. 111–126.

CHAPTER 4

Drivers of Expenditure Allocation in the IOM: Refugees, Donors, and International Bureaucracy Ronny Patz and Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir

Introduction The International Organization for Migration (IOM), unlike the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has long been an understudied subject in research on international organisations (IOs). This is surprising given that the IOM’s predecessor organisations date as far back as the UNHCR’s own history. The IOM was even created in explicit competition with UNHCR: IOM and UNHCR have a long history of rivalry about competencies and government money and a general animosity growing from conflicting political assignments and philosophical worldviews. (Georgi 2010, 54)

This suggests that the joint histories of the IOM and UNHCR could be connected through overlap and competition and are worthy of more R. Patz (*) • S. Thorvaldsdottir LMU Munich, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Geiger, A. Pécoud (eds.), The International Organization for Migration, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1_4

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in-­depth study. Yet the IOM has long acted in the shadow of other United Nations (UN) organisations, not just the UNHCR. It only joined the UN system as a ‘Related Organisation’ in 2016, after 65 years of being somewhat of an outsider organisation despite its headquarters being situated right next to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, just a seven-minute bus ride from UNHCR headquarters and the Palais des Nations. This outsider situation, however, is slowly changing. The negotiations on the Global Compact on Migration (GCM) started at the same time as the IOM’s entry in the UN system (Newland 2018), increasing political and academic attention to the organisation. In the past few years, researchers mainly from the field of global (forced) migration studies have turned towards consolidating their collective knowledge on the organisation (see Pécoud 2018). Comparative international organisations (IO) research has also begun to investigate the organisation, in particular in comparing it to the UNHCR (Hall 2015, 2016). From an IO resourcing perspective (Goetz and Patz 2017), the lack of attention to the IOM is surprising, given that the organisation’s expenditure budget now exceeds that of traditional UN Specialised Agencies such as the ILO and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO; Patz and Goetz 2019).1 In addition, as we shall discuss in this chapter, the IOM’s financial setup is rather unique. At the same time, the IOM is an IO that is active in a wider organisational field concerned with global migration policy—a field in which it interacts with both the UNHCR and other IOs—where its financing is not independent of that of other IOs. In view of the emerging division of labour in the UN system, where the UNHCR is responsible for refugees (through the Global Compact on Refugees [GCR]), while the IOM is responsible for migration more generally (through the GCM), understanding where the IOM stands and what its financial situation is relative to related organisations is crucial for understanding its potential future role in the wider UN family. In this chapter, we contribute to the consolidation of knowledge and the comparative research agenda on the IOM by studying the drivers of expenditure allocation in the IOM and comparing it with that of the UNHCR in order to better understand the distinct role that the IOM plays in the international arena. Knowing that both organisations are 1  Created alongside the League of Nations 100 years ago in 1919, the ILO was responsible for migration and refugee issues in the League of Nations system.

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primarily financed through voluntary contributions from donor states and from a few other key donors such as the European Union, we investigate how the IOM differs from the UNHCR at the field level in its response to the global distribution of refugees and other key populations of concerns. Additionally, we focus our attention on the role that the geopolitical interests of major donor states play in explaining the IOM expenditure patterns, again with a special eye to how the IOM is distinct from the UNHCR. The comparative literature on the two suggests significant differences between the organisations: the UNHCR should follow its refugee mandate, while the IOM lacks such a mandate. Instead, the IOM has developed a broad understanding of migration and has built a stronger service orientation towards its donors (Hall 2015, 2016). While from an organisational perspective we would expect the two IOs to differ in their structures, both are expected to be heavily influenced by their major donors. Donors may use this influence to either undermine mandates (in the case of the UNHCR) or simply shape the global operations of the IO, for example through a ‘projectisation’ of funding in the case of the IOM (Pécoud 2018). Yet given the relative dearth of research on the IOM relative to the UNHCR, we do not know whether these expectations are borne out empirically. Using a novel dataset on the IOM’s country-level expenditure patterns and state donor contributions from 1999 until 2016, we study the IOM’s expenditure allocation and the factors that drive it. We compare this with similar UNHCR data from the same time period. Our findings demonstrate that the IOM is clearly distinct from the UNHCR in its country-­ level operations and especially its orientation towards key donor interests. While the UNHCR is able to direct its expenditures towards the locations of its main population of concern—refugees—with no direct evidence of donor influence, the IOM expenditure patterns are much more directed towards other populations of concern and towards specific donor interests. A key difference is also that the IOM provides significant migration-­ related services within major donor states, whereas the UNHCR is active mostly in refugee situations outside major donor states. Overall, the IOM appears to be much more donor-driven than the UNHCR. These findings further emphasise the need to study the IOM and its operations both on its own and in comparison with other IOs dealing with displaced populations of any kind.

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The Resourcing of the IOM Quite a few differences between the IOM and the UNHCR have previously been noted, in particular the difference between what appears to be a mandate-driven IO (UNHCR) and the more ‘functional’ IOM (Hall 2015). Indeed, the two have a long and shared history since their creation in the early 1950s (Elie 2010). The predecessors of the IOM came to life in 1951, just shortly after UNHCR’s foundation.2 Both IOs were created in response to the large number of refugees and displaced persons in post-­ World War II Europe. While both emerged, directly and indirectly, from the ruins of the failed International Refugee Organisation (IRO), they were set on two different paths. The IOM was created by mainly Western countries under the leadership of the United States, which was critical of the UNHCR and the ILO, while the UNHCR became a mandate-driven United Nations agency basing its work on the 1951 Geneva Convention. The IOM’s main task was to provide various refugee- and migration-­ related logistical services to its member and donor states and to prevent Communist influence (Georgi 2010). Whereas some scholarly attention has been directed towards the IOM in recent years, dedicated studies of the organisation’s finances have confined themselves to examining the first decade of its existence, when it was still the International Committee for European Migration (Franghiadis 2015). This research found that the overall expenditure of the IOM in its early years was actually higher than that of the UNHCR, the ILO, and the WHO. Operational expenditures reached their peak in 1957 at above US $45 million. At the time, the IOM had ‘one of the largest operating budgets amongst international organizations’ even though ‘most of these resources were allocated for … migrant and refugee transportation’ (Franghiadis 2015, 121). This notion of the IOM as a travel agency of sorts—with transport operations dominating the organisation’s finances for a long time— continues to resonate today. In addition to these early historic accounts, Georgi’s recent detailed analysis of the entire history of the agency (Georgi 2019) also covers major developments in the resource situation of the organisation. From losing out to a growing UNHCR in the early 1970s (Georgi 2019, 111) and a budgetary crisis in the m ­ id-­1970s (125), in part created 2  The IOM’s earliest predecessors were the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME), later renamed the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), and then the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM), before becoming the IOM in 1989.

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by Australia’s decision to leave the organisation in 1973 (116), to renewed budgetary growth in the wake of the refugee situation in Southeast Asia in the second half of the 1970s (126–127), the IOM faced challenging and changing resource situations that are not unfamiliar to many IOs. After consolidating its finances and political reputation during the 1980s (Georgi 2019, 176), and, again, a period of budgetary deficits in the early 1990s (201–2), the IOM then used the second half of the 1990s to change its resource model to where it stands today, that is, towards a generalised ‘projectisation’ (203–4). Today, the IOM’s financing model allows the agency to direct the bulk of its expenditures far beyond the simple migrant transport operations for which it was used throughout its history. Nonetheless, transport operations are still part of the portfolio of services the IOM provides to member states and, in some years, have accounted for up to approximately 20 per cent of its overall expenditures (US $318 million out of US $1.556 billion in total expenses in 2016; see C/108/3, 15). One of the reasons that this remains an activity for which donor states enlist the IOM is its ‘global airline agreements’. These provide the IOM with special prices, most likely creating competitive advantages for states making use of the IOM services to transport migrants: [The department responsible in IOM] negotiates and maintains global agreements with most major airlines and a number of air charter operators offering preferential fares and priority service to IOM passengers and providing IOM with readily available transport options worldwide. (MC/2377, 39)

However, while ‘transport operations are a core element of IOM’s activity’ (MC/2377, 39), its global operations extend well beyond transporting refugees and other migrants. These operations can appear rather eclectic, even if they stay within the realm of migration policy and migration management. Pécoud states that the [IOM] is an intergovernmental organisation, but at times seems to function like a private company, while also competing with civil society groups and NGOs. … IOM appears as a loosely connected network of projects and field offices, addressing a heteroclite range of issues, and moving quickly from one to another, according to opportunities and circumstances. (Pécoud 2018, 1622)

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Most academic observations mirror Pécoud’s interpretation of the IOM as a project-based organisation active in a variety of substantive domains. This project-based orientation, which the IOM was pushed into by donor states in the mid-1990s (Georgi 2019, 179) as part of new financing strategies (203–4), is clearly reflected in the way it constructs its budget and financial reporting. The programme and budget adopted by the organisation every year only contains conservative calculations for projects whose funding is already secured from donors ahead of budget adoption. Later in the budget year, a revision of the programme and budget is adopted; this can be significantly higher than the initial budget after field offices have raised funds for new projects. For example, the 2018 budget of US $1.491  billion was raised in October 2018 with US $314.6  million (C/109/9, 1), a 20 per cent increase. Budgeting in the IOM today is more a way of accounting for fundraising efforts than a process of resource allocation. Additionally, fundraising in the IOM is heavily decentralised, as country offices and sub-offices are ‘financed predominantly by the projects implemented in these locations’ (C/108/3, 13). This decentralised fundraising was introduced by organisational reforms in the second half of the 1990s (Georgi 2019, 223–8). Today, this fundraising is supported by ‘certain Country Offices that coordinate substantial funding for IOM’s activities worldwide’ with major donors in ‘Berlin, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; Tokyo, Japan; and Washington, D.C., United States’ (C/108/3, 13). Background discussions with the IOM officials held by the authors indicate that offices like the one in Brussels—with the EU being a major donor—are also relevant for the IOM financing. However, their core goal is not so much fundraising but rather performing liaison functions to ensure proper financial reporting and to link the IOM field offices from around the world with relevant European Commission departments that provide project funding. Because of this setup, with limited central budgeting and heavily decentralised fundraising, major donors like the UK seek influence over the organisation only at the project level, through direct financing rather than through the governance bodies at headquarters level (Hall 2016, 89–90). Project-based financing is a form of very tight earmarking with direct donor control. This suggests that the organisation, on average, should follow the geopolitical priorities of individual donors to a much greater extent than any centralised mandate or collective donor preferences. As indicated by background discussions with the IOM staff, the organisation

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sees itself as a service provider with a competitive advantage in countrylevel service delivery. Unlike the UNHCR, its financial operations are not oriented towards a core mandate.

The Resourcing of the UNHCR in Comparison to the IOM Unlike the IOM, the UNHCR has been the subject of extensive scholarship (Betts 2003, 2009, 2013a, b; Betts et  al. 2012; Ben-Nun 2017; Thorvaldsdottir et al. 2019). Regarded as the key actor in global refugee policy, it is commonly described as driven by its obligations derived from the Geneva Convention and as a traditional ‘normative’ and mandate-­ driven organisation (Hall 2015)—even though some have seen it drift away from its mandate and towards more organisationally pathological behaviour (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). Today, this mandate is self-­ described as serving ‘refugees globally, regardless of the location of the refugees’ (UNHCR 2013, 3), despite an early focus on post-World War II refugees in Europe—just like the IOM. In view of its global mandate, mobilising sufficient resources to fulfil its responsibilities has always been a challenge for the UNHCR (Betts et al. 2012, 96–100). Some scholars go so far as to describe it as basically a ‘huge fundraising organization’ (Väyrynen 2001, 150). In large part this is because the UNHCR is eligible for assessed funds from the core UN budget only to finance its main administrative costs, or approximately 2 per cent of its operating budget (Roper and Barria 2010), while the rest has to be funded through voluntary contributions. Thus fundraising, mainly from major donor countries or multilateral aid providers like the European Union, supplemented with private donations, is a central task for the UNHCR in order for it to fulfil its mandate. Due to this, the organisation, like the IOM, is vulnerable to donor state influence on its operations and mandate delivery (for more detailed research, see Thorvaldsdottir et al. 2019). Previous research has found that major donor states, in particular the United States, have ‘a disproportionate influence’ over the UNHCR (Betts et al. 2012, 97), similar to dynamics observed throughout the IOM’s history (Georgi 2019). Using 1995–2005 donor data, Roper and Barria show that ‘[c]ontributions to the UNHCR … may have little to do with the refugee emergency or humanitarian crisis at hand’ and that ‘states

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provide larger contributions because of their own domestic and foreign policy priorities that may not be linked to larger humanitarian issues’ (2010, 621). And while the organisation has been able, in the main, to allocate the funds available in line with its mandate of serving refugees globally, in certain periods (such as the early 1990s) major Western donors were able to direct its attention to conflicts closer to them (Thorvaldsdottir et al. 2019). More precisely, Whitaker (2008) shows that UNHCR funds allocated to the refugee situation in the Western Balkans negatively impacted financing for the much larger refugee situation in the East African Great Lakes region at the same time. This underlines that even an organisation oriented towards a core mandate can be influenced by major donors, especially when refugee situations are ‘closer to home’. The extent to which the same tensions are borne out in the IOM has been studied to a much lesser degree, making a comparison of the two organisations especially useful for understanding the ways in which the IOM operates distinctly from the UNHCR. A key difference with the IOM’s project-level earmarking is that the UNHCR’s expenditure budget of US $4.083 billion in 2017 (A/73/5/ Add.6, §45) had about 17 per cent unrestricted financing available, with a similar amount earmarked for the regional or subregional level (A/73/5/ Add.6, §15). Thus, while the UNHCR also operates through project funding, it has access to a certain amount of flexible funding that can be allocated with some degree of freedom outside of donors’ immediate control, unlike the IOM’s heavy projectisation. We suggest in the following section that this has theoretically relevant consequences.

Theory and Hypotheses: IOs Between Donor Interests and Populations of Concern The review of the resourcing situations of the IOM and its comparison with the UNHCR in the previous sections has already indicated that the dynamics of expenditure allocation in the two organisations are expected to be driven by multiple factors. Whereas the UNHCR’s expenditure allocation is expected to be driven by its mandate to serve refugees around the world, the IOM is oriented towards a broader population of concern and not bound by a clear-cut mandate. At the same time, both organisations are expected to be influenced by donors. Through their financial weight or through earmarking, these donors may direct the organisations away from

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their respective populations of concern, although potentially to different degrees. The theoretical argument underlying these expectations builds on the growing literature on the resourcing of IOs (Goetz and Patz 2017; Michaelowa 2017), more traditional theories of state influence on IOs, and the growing literature on IO bureaucracy (Bauer et al. 2017). Donor Influence on IOs States do not simply join IOs and then provide membership contributions that are allocated according to collectively formulated priorities. There is little disagreement in the academic literature that states use their contributions, in particular earmarked voluntary contributions, to individually and collectively influence IOs and their bureaucracies inside and outside of established multilateral decision-making bodies (Graham 2015, 2017a, b; Thorvaldsdottir 2016, 2017). Many international agencies, especially in the UN system, depend heavily or completely on voluntary support that states can withdraw at will (Bayram and Graham 2017). Because of the credible threat of withdrawing funding and through the increasing use of earmarking, major donors are expected to be willing and able to direct IOs through formal and informal means to act in line with their own preferences. However, a key question is in what direction states try to (re)direct IOs. In the domain of humanitarian aid, it has been argued that ‘[d]isproportionate spending is likely to flow to emergencies that are closer to donor countries than to those that are farther away’ (Smillie and Minear 2003, 7). In a domain like refugee policy, those donor concerns may stem from the fear of spillover (Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006). Germany’s increased funding to UN organisations in the domain of refugee policy after the arrival in 2015 of a significant number of refugees and asylum seekers is a good example of these dynamics. Donors may thus try to ‘derive state-­ specific security benefits’ (Betts 2003, 292) by earmarking their funding both geographically and substantively: they may, for example, provide a higher level of financial support for geographically proximate recipient states. In addition, donors not only choose whether, and to what extent, they support single IOs, but they can also selectively provide funding for competing IOs with overlapping mandates or capabilities. This is most likely to happen with IOs active in similar policy domains. This ability to pick and choose may create additional pressure on IOs to provide services or become active where donors want them to be active. Alternatively, it

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may lead to specialisation, with different IOs catering to different donor interests in different geographical locations or in different substantive areas—for example, by serving different populations of concern. Mandates and the Role of IO Bureaucracy If IOs were simply unfiltered transmission mechanisms of states’ global distributive preferences, the expenditure patterns of IOs should always be tilted towards major donors’ interests. In IOs that are fully dominated by state interests, the allocation of expenditures should not follow the scale and global distribution of a given policy problem. Instead, expenditure allocation should reflect the geopolitical considerations of the donors who provided most of the funding and thus held the highest influence. However, since budgeting and fundraising in IOs are at least partially delegated to international bureaucracies (Graham 2015, 2017a; Patz and Goetz 2017; Ege and Bauer 2017), states and other donors are not the only drivers of resource mobilisation and expenditure allocation. IO bureaucracies are created to help solve collective action problems and implement IO mandates, which suggest that they try to ensure that resource mobilisation and resource allocation are to some degree supportive of their respective mandate—at least where such a mandate exists. This argument builds on the assertion that IO bureaucracies are problem-­ solvers in global policymaking (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2013). When this is the case, IO bureaucracies should attempt to counteract donor interests or at least redirect the complex principal towards problem-­ solving. What kind of problem-solving IO bureaucracies will favour depends on the formal design of their respective IOs (Koremenos et al. 2001; Hawkins et al. 2006; Hooghe and Marks 2015; Hall 2015; Hooghe et al. 2017). Since IO bureaucracies may also develop independent identities over time (Barnett and Finnemore 2004), gaining so-called autonomy of will (Bauer and Ege 2016, 2017) in addition to expert authority which can increase autonomy (Johnson and Urpelainen 2014; Busch and Liese 2017; Littoz-Monnet 2017), we can postulate that they will use their ability to raise voluntary contributions in line with their mandate-­related preferences. At the same time, IO bureaucracies have an incentive to be resource maximisers (Vaubel 2006), so finding a balance between problem-solving and increasing their revenue might not always go together.

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Given these theoretical considerations, in combination with our understanding of the key issues that make the IOM distinct from the UNHCR when it comes to financing and resource mobilisation strategies, and considering that the latter has a clear-cut refugee-oriented mandate, we develop the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: IOs’ expenditure patterns follow their mandate- or task-­ related problem pressure. • Hypothesis 1.1: The IOM is less responsive in its country-level expenditures to shifts in refugee populations in recipient countries than the UNHCR. • Hypothesis 1.2: The IOM is more responsive in its country-level expenditures to shifts in non-refugee populations in recipient countries than it is to shifts in refugee populations. Hypothesis 2: IOs’ expenditure patterns follow donor interests more strongly when an organisation is more heavily dependent on earmarked contributions. • Hypothesis 2.1: Donor interests impact the IOM more strongly than they impact the UNHCR.

The IOM and UNHCR Finances from 1999 to 2016: Expenditure Patterns and Donor Influence Financial Data and Interest Measure In order to test our hypotheses about variations in expenditure patterns, we coded an original dataset of country-level annual expenditures for the IOM and UNHCR. This allows us to examine precisely how much money was spent by the organisations each year in every recipient state. Total country-level expenditures by both agencies from 1999 to 2016 are plotted in Fig. 4.1. The data not only demonstrate that the IOM is the smaller organisation in terms of expenditures but also hints at the different roles the two organisations play. As the Syrian crisis grew dramatically in 2014, we see that the increase in UNHCR expenditures was much greater than for the IOM. This further highlights the earlier discussion about how the UNHCR has a mandate to serve refugees, whereas the IOM does not.

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Expenditure (Millions USD)

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Fig. 4.1  Total country-level expenditures in the IOM and UNHCR. (Source: Annual financial reports)

In keeping with a growing body of literature demonstrating how donors can use their funding to influence IO policies, we also coded annual contributions to the two organisations. This allows us to test hypotheses about member state influence over IO expenditures by using donations as a proxy for the ability of states to influence IOs. Total government donations to both agencies are plotted in Fig. 4.2. Unsurprisingly, these donations follow a rather similar pattern to the expenditure graph; this is largely a result of the organisations needing sufficient funds to cover their operations (i.e., they are not permitted to run deficits). In order to capture not only how much donor states may be able to influence IOs but also which recipient countries they are particularly interested in, we combine the donations data with a measure of the geographic distance between donor and recipient.3 Previous scholarship has suggested, and several high-level interviews confirmed, that geographic distance is a highly salient factor in determining donor interest when it came to refugee policy. In combining these two measures, we create an interest-­ weighted influence score (IWIS) for each recipient, with interest captured by distance and influence by (share of) donations. 3

 Geographical distances were calculated based on Weidmann et al. (2010).

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Fig. 4.2  Total state voluntary contributions to the IOM and UNHCR. (Source: Annual financial reports)

To derive the IWIS score, we multiply the geographic distance between a donor and a recipient by the percentage of total donations to the IOM or the UNHCR that the donor country contributed in a given year.4 This dyadic measure allows us to evaluate the weighted interest of a single donor on a single recipient; it also can be aggregated across donors, as we do in our analysis, to get an overall measure of a particular recipient’s importance to all donors or a subset of donors. To give an example of the calculation: in 2015, Japan contributed about 3 per cent of all total donations to the IOM, and thus Japan’s geographical distance to each recipient country is multiplied by 0.03 to account for Japan’s ability to influence the organisation with regard to any recipient country relative to the donors responsible for the other 97 per cent of contributions. In the same year, Japan provided 6 per cent of all total donations to the UNHCR, and thus the geographical distance to each recipient to Japan is multiplied by 0.06. Thus, when this variable takes on a large number, this suggests either that the recipient and donor are far apart geographically or that the donor is responsible for a large percentage of donations to the organisation in a particular year, or both. Given our expectation that donors care more about refugee situations that are geographically proximate, we expect an  See similar application in the context of the European Commission by Schneider and Tobin, 2013. 4

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inverse relationship between this variable and in-country expenditures, such that lower values of this variable are associated with increased expenditures (and, conversely, that higher values are associated with reduced expenditures). The UNHCR data (both expenditures and donations) were coded manually from the series of reports Financial report and audited financial statements, submitted annually to the UN General Assembly from the UNHCR Board of Auditors during most of our period of interest (1999–2016).5 The IOM data were also coded manually from annual financial reports available on the IOM’s website from 1999 onwards. We code separately assessed contributions and programmatic contributions but use only the latter in the current analysis, as the assessed contributions are not intended for programmatic purposes. Expenditures for both agencies are coded in nominal US dollars (except for the IOM-assessed contributions, which are reported in Swiss francs), but, for the purposes of the empirical analysis, we convert this figure to real 2010 US dollars and take the natural log in order to reduce the influence of extreme outliers on our results and remove the effects of inflation or deflation on the expenditures. Populations of Concern and Other Drivers of Expenditure Allocation To evaluate our hypotheses regarding the impact of displaced populations on expenditure, we use data from the UNHCR Population Statistics Database, which captures the global refugee and forced migration populations that the two organisations serve.6 Although maintained by the UNHCR, this is the population served by both agencies and a number of other international agencies. Notably, these figures exclude the displaced population served by United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. The latter population is not only counted separately but also served primarily by UNRWA under its UN General Assembly mandate. 5  These reports were downloaded through the UN Official Documents System (ODS) whenever possible and from the UN Digital Library for years not available through ODS. From 2010 onwards, the financial reports no longer contain country-level data, so we use data provided to the UN System Chief Executive Board for Coordination (UNSCEB) instead. 6  See http://popstats.unhcr.org/en/overview for a detailed overview of the different categories and their definitions. Note that the UNHCR does not maintain data on the population that falls under the mandate of UNRWA.

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60

Asylum

IDPs Others of concern Refugee-like Refugees Returned IDPs Returnees Stateless

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Fig. 4.3  Total populations of concern. (Source: UNHCR population statistics database)

Figure 4.3 gives an overview of the scope of these populations over time. The refugee category was the largest of the different populations that the UNHCR kept track of until the mid-2000s, when it was surpassed by internally displaced people (IDPs). This increase is explained, in large part, by the Syrian conflict but also by the fact that the definition of IDPs was broadened somewhat starting in 2007. To investigate the mandate-­ delivery orientation of these two organisations versus their responsiveness to other displaced populations, we create two main population-based variables in the statistical analysis: the (logged) number of refugees at the country level and the (logged) total of other displaced population. To account for other important potential determinants of funding allocation, we include three recipient-country control variables in our analysis. First, we control for gross domestic product (GDP) to account for inter-­ country variation in countries’ ability to deal with an influx of refugees through their own domestic budgets.7 Second, we control for population size, considering the fact that bigger countries may have a greater ability 7  We have also used GDP per capita in our regression models, and the results are the same, which is unsurprising as we also controlled for population. However, as our interest is in measuring overall absorption capacity in a country, we prefer to use GDP in our main models.

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to highlight refugee crises within their borders and thus might attract more funding. Third, we control for the Polity Score to account for the possibility that countries with strong democratic institutions may be better at attracting funding due to less concern about mismanagement of funding or greater feelings of affinity towards more democratic recipients from the largely democratic donor states.8 Both recipient states’ GDP and population size are logged in the empirical analysis. As the control variables are not all available until 2016, the regression analysis ends in 2014. Lastly, our models include time-fixed effects to control for year-specific determinants of overall expenditure. Statistical Analysis and Regression Results In order to investigate the impact of populations of concern and donor interest on expenditures allocation, we use a fixed-effects ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis. Thus, the models use expenditure by either the IOM or UNHCR in country i and year t as a dependent variable, the number of refugees and number of non-refugee displaced individuals in country i and year t as well as the influence-weighted donor distance to recipient as the main independent variables. As noted earlier, we also control for important confounders that may also influence how these two agencies allocate resources, namely GDP, Population, and the Polity Score. For a cleaner presentation of the findings, we regress separately on expenditures in the individual organisations; however, all the results hold when we pool both organisations in the same regression model. Table 4.1 shows the results of regressions where we include the populations of interest (i.e., both refugees and non-refugee displaced) as well as the total weighted distance between all donors and recipients. Model 1 shows the results for the UNHCR, while Model 2 focuses on the IOM. Immediately notable is the fact that only in the case of the UNHCR does the size of the refugee population significantly determine expenditures.9 8  The Polity Score is one of the more common measures of how democratic governmental institutions are within a country. It is a composite index that ranks countries on a scale of −10 to +10, where −10 indicates a fully institutionalised autocracy and +10 indicates a fully institutionalised democracy (Marshall and Cole 2011). It includes all countries with populations greater than 500,000 in the most recent year. 9  To give a sense of the magnitude of the effect, we can interpret the coefficient on refugees to indicate that a 10 per cent increase in refugee population is associated with an almost 6 per

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Table 4.1  Fixed-effects ordinary least squares (OLS) regression Dependent variable: In-country expenditures (log)

Number of refugees (log) Other population of concern (log) IWIS—Geographical distance Recipient country: Polity Score GDP (real 2010 USD, log) Population (log) Observations Adjusted R2 Year fixed effects

UNHCR (1)

IOM (2)

0.575∗∗∗ (0.101) 0.573∗∗∗ (0.083) −0.120 (0.188)

−0.067 (0.104) 0.399∗∗∗ (0.080) −0.730∗∗∗ (0.223)

−0.069∗∗∗ (0.045) −0.739∗∗∗ (0.271) 1.741∗∗∗ (0.442) 2,399 0.858 ✓

0.138∗∗∗ (0.051) 0.074 (0.283) 1.517∗∗∗ (0.485) 2,399 0.351 ✓

Models (1) and (2) testing hypotheses 1.1, 1.2, and 2.1 Notes: ∗p