ABSTRACT
The conclusion summarizes the empirical findings and reflects on the practice-theoretical framework advanced in this book. It argues that migration management means to teach (potential) migrants and North African actors to understand migration control as their own problem and to take action appropriate with the dominant logics in the field: neoliberalism, humanitarianism, and security. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) supports this process through social work and education, aid and assistance, production and dissemination of knowledge, and capacity building. While the IOM distinguishes its work from repressive migration politics, the book shows how the organization advances different logics, which reinforce and sometimes contradict each other, and contribute to stabilize the border regime in the Mediterranean. It concludes that the IOM is neither a sheer instrument of states nor is it independent of them. The organization rather interferes in the complex relations in the trans-Mediterranean field of migration management in which it can shape dominant logic and doxic beliefs and stretch boundaries to include new modes and content of control, such as gendered and racialized hierarchies for international mobility and protection. In light of the symbolic power and violence that obliterates the actual consequences of these control practices, the IOM’s migration management is widely accepted as legitimate and remains misrecognized as being imposed from a specific position in the field.
