ABSTRACT
The chapter demonstrates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) emerged in North Africa with fading stability and legitimacy in the expanding European border regime, promoting its services to govern migration in more efficient, sustainable, and dignified ways than security-oriented forms of migration control. The chapter proceeds in three steps: the first part introduces the IOM with its historical dynamics, internal structures, and relations in the trans-Mediterranean field of migration politics. The second part recalls the historical developments in European and North African migration politics since the 1990s to reconstruct the emergence and shifts in logic of today’s trans-Mediterranean field of migration management. It introduces relevant actors and their stakes, and carves out the logic and doxic beliefs that structure the field. The last part reviews academic literature about the politics of international migration management, examining this new paradigm in terms of changing discourses, practices, and institutional reconfigurations. The chapter concludes that studying the IOM helps us to understand the reconfigurations of migration control in the Mediterranean under the management paradigm since it is both a major implementation partner for migration-related projects financed by the European states and an active promoter of a global vision of ‘managing migration to the benefit of all.’
