ABSTRACT
Starting from so-called migration crises in Morocco in 2005 and Tunisia in 2011, the introduction sets the stage for the politics of migration management, its new actors, practices, and logic to emerge and expand when the security-oriented, militarized border regime was challenged by the struggles of migration in the North African borderlands. It is these actors, practices, and logic that are at the center stage of the book in order to reveal how the control of human mobility outside Europe has changed under the politics of international migration management in the early 2000s. The introduction explains how Morocco and Tunisia became important laboratories for external actors implementing new practices to control migration outside European territory without the use of physical force and obvious repression. Subsequently, it introduces the case of the International Organization for Migration and situates the organization within debates on how international organizations are implicated in the politics of externalizing migration control. Against this background, it outlines a praxeological perspective to study the organization’s practices and negotiations in the trans-Mediterranean field of migration management. It also sketches out the methods used in this study. The introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s structure and main arguments.
