‘Beneficiary-Ownership’? Redemptive Knowledge and Policy-Making on Migration in West Africa

ABSTRACT

West Africa sees major activity in the development of migration policies, promoted by international organisations, funded by governments mainly of Europe. Policy development is couched in terms of ‘beneficiary-ownership’, stressing the participation of West African governments. This is problematised as playing down the influence of European and international organisations. We argue that policy-making on migration in West Africa is better understood through the lens of ‘subjectional diplomacy’, a one-sided yet complex relationship between national and international actors that consolidates particular discourses of the ‘problem’ of migration. We find interview and documentary evidence from NGOs and governmental actors across Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea as well as ECOWAS Headquarters and international governmental organisations in Abuja that the logic of beneficiary-ownership is not symmetric. We show how the IOM holds ‘redemptive’ knowledge that turns the civilising mission of old into a professionalising mission embedding neo-colonial relations.

Introduction

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is a chief advocate for promoting ‘safe, regular and orderly’ migration and a need for migration policy (Pécoud 2017). For some years there has been effort and resource engaged in establishing national migration policies in a range of countries, specifically in Africa (Aguillon 2020; Kabbanji 2013; Perrin 2020; Soukouna 2020). The IOM has initiated and facilitated processes of migration policy formulation, not just in West Africa. In doing so, IOM seeks to position itself as the inevitable partner to governments. Funding is provided, mainly, by European governments and institutions (Roos et al. 2023). The resulting policies are interesting not just for their content, which often read like a list of migration concerns pushed by countries such as those in Europe, thus raising questions of relevance; but also for the dynamics and relationships that are highlighted in the making of those policies.

In West Africa, these initiatives are situated within the context of African Union (AU) framing and a common approach to migration policy within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). In November 1998 the IOM and the then OAU agreed to cooperate formally to ‘coordinate their activities to address the challenges posed by international migration’ (Panafrican News Agency, Dakar, 19 October 2000). Nearly 25 years later, on the 3rd of March 2022 the IOM and the AU signed a new agreement to strengthen ‘Migration Policies and Frameworks in Africa’ (MPFA). A news item on the IOM website informed its readers that IOM is to ‘assist the efforts of member states to develop and implement migration policies and institutional frameworks consistent with the UN Agenda 2030 and the African Union’s Agenda 2063’ (IOM, Geneva, 3 March 2022). The agreement is particularly important as it allows for ‘continued implementation of […] the MPFA, which provides African Member States and regional economic communities [such as the ECOWAS] with comprehensive policy guidelines and principles to assist in formulating and implementing national and regional migration policies in accordance with their priorities and resources (IOM, Geneva, 3 March 2022, our emphasis). In this way, and notwithstanding its identity as a ‘non-normative’ UN-affiliated organisation (Guild et al. 2020), the IOM involves itself with the norm setting process.

The European Union (EU) and its member states are involved by promoting many of these initiatives as well as providing funding for aspects of both negotiation and implementation. Also part of the picture are ‘beneficiary states’ – members of the ECOWAS – who are identified as ‘in need’ of having a dedicated country-level migration policy. The IOM’s role is interesting in the context of narratives of self-determination insisted upon by countries globally in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), reflective of a world that emphasises notions of sovereignty, especially when it comes to international migration. It is however most interesting in the context of language used by IOM to express its relations with governments. IOM explains that it ‘collaborates’ with governments on migration policymaking and that these processes are based on equal partnerships. IOM officials, we were told in conversations and interviews, often go further, stressing that they work by the principle of beneficiary-ownership – this will be problematised further below.

In this paper, we are specifically interested in the function that the notion or logic of ‘beneficiary-ownership’ has in the diplomatic relations that lead to migration policy in West Africa. Beneficiary-ownership was introduced by the OECD (2012) with the aim of making sure that development approaches are not top-down, but appropriate to what is to be delivered and by whom. In other words, the idea is to make sure that local actors in regions and countries in which development activity happens are in the driving seat (Serban 2021). What we want to problematise here is that the notion of beneficiary-ownership, however, plays down the influence of European and international organisations. Content and conduct are still tightly choreographed onto ‘professional standards’ of the development and migration industries. These are relationships that are not-quite-coerced, but also not-quite-genuine, as IOM both makes and solves problems and experiments with and on migration policymaking. As argued by Pécoud (2017, 83), the importance of having a migration policy is formulated in ‘indisputable objectives’ and for the benefit of all parties. We will draw on Constantinou and McConnell (2023) making use of the notion of subjectional diplomacy in which the right to communicate and to negotiate is enacted – if not explicitly claimed – by grounding the regulation of international migration in a shared commons, or as ‘a cross-cutting international issue’. In the context of North-South relations, beneficiary-ownership has historical and ongoing political salience, though it is technically a nonsense and politically deeply problematic for the relationships it hides. Given the complex and uneven relationships between Europe and Africa, the historical legacy of colonialism resonates in contemporary entanglements on migration policymaking in West African countries (Bradley 2022; Opondo 2010), including in interactions with international organisations, such as the IOM.

Our contention here is that the rhetorical device of beneficiary-ownership is expressive of interesting contradictions about who leads and owns such processes in practice. It is thus not just the policies (and their content) that are of interest, but also the dynamics and relationships that give character to the way policies are made when the IOM is aware of postcolonial sensibilities (Bradley 2022; Frowd 2018). Here, we make use of concepts offered in the post-colonial literature to support the premise that the IOM’s involvement in Africa might be best understood in missionary terms (Barnett and Finnemore 1999), moulding care and control to impart a particular perspective about the world which is ordered through mobility practices. We do so through an engagement with the critical diplomacy literature (for an overview see Constantinou 2013; Constantinou, Kerr, and Sharp 2016), for which policymaking on migration is not a mainstream point of focus. We argue that policy is being made in a multilateral diplomatic space that is characterised by the legacy of colonial relations, in which IOM seamlessly slots in and takes on some of the characteristics of missionary, akin to those of the colonial era.

We draw on interviews with IOM, the ECOWAS and other actors involved, as well as on archival data collected from an IOM repository that was kindly opened to us during the data collection phase. In the context of this project we have conducted research in Guinea, The Gambia and Senegal between 2019 and 2021 and amongst other things have asked about the making of those migration policies which were, at the point of research, at different stages of development and ‘validation’ by the beneficiary states.

In what follows, we first place this data in the context of relevant literature that discusses migration policy in relation to the IOM. We are interested in diplomatic relations in spaces of multilateral and cross organisational negotiations, which construct a particular understanding of international mobility. We then discuss our methodological approach to analysis. These two preparatory steps are followed by four analytical sections on beneficiary-led policymaking that are structured beginning with the general and moving to the specific. This structure at the same time also sheds light on the processual steps intended to arrive at a validated migration-policy for a beneficiary state. Specifically, the first analytical section sets out the institutional and regulatory field and how this pressures national governments to develop migration policy, whether or not that had been a priority. The second analytical section engages with how IOM positions itself and engages with relevant government entities to prepare the knowledge-basis on which migration policy decisions might rest. The third analytical section then asks questions about the roles ‘redemptive knowledge’ on the one hand, and technologies of engagement on the other, play in the process of policymaking, whilst the last analytical section discusses how all these steps amount to what we identify as ‘subjectional diplomacy’ as ‘beneficiary-ownership’ is crafted. The conclusion finds that the relational dynamics involved in the encounters between all actors involved are indeed multi-layered and cannot be reduced to an assumption that either the IOM or the donors, such as EU members, impose in a unidirectional way. Nor, however, can it be concluded that governments of West Africa would be free to reject engagement with migration-policymaking of the kind proposed by IOM.

The IOM and Migration Policy-Making in the Literature

An increasing number of researchers have recently sought to engage with the IOM and make sense of how – as an organisation – it works and intervenes in government’s national policies, especially in non-donor countries around the world (Ashutosh and Mountz 2011; Bradley 2020, 2022; Bradley, Costello, and Sherwood 2023; Pécoud 2018). In such countries self-determination is an important principle of policy-making as a result of the colonial experience. It is also often undermined by practices of development and globalisation. This is not to be naïve about interdependence (Duffield 2007). States and peoples have always been closely linked in multiple ways before globalisation and before colonialism: the linking has always been through mobility (Mbembe and Chauvet 2020). But the current condition of trying to intervene – often obsessively – in mobility as a major focus for ordering our contemporary world begs interesting questions about both content and relationships that are moulded through these interactions. The justification for such interactions that they involve ‘beneficiary-ownership’ by the regional and national governing entities engaged with is of particular interest.

Kamwengo (2020, 58) discusses beneficiary-ownership in the context of partnerships for development and observes that ‘the power and influence that Southern development cooperation providers have acquired in global development architecture has been dependent on “less developed” countries actually seeking their knowledge and resources’. Her study ‘has shown that beneficiary ownership is significantly influenced by power inequalities, changes in political leadership, conflicting stakeholder interests within the beneficiary country and in its relationship with the development cooperation provider’ (Kamwengo 2020, 180). There are parallels between development and migration discourses, not just because the migration and development industries increasingly overlap, but more so because the tools that both industries use are increasingly similar, as is the articulation of problems and solutions. The IOM has established itself in a hegemonic position as a provider of knowledge and resource, and thus engaging in norm-setting work despite its insistence on being a non-normative agency (Pécoud 2020, 22; see also Bradley, Costello, and Sherwood 2023). In this brief literature review we discuss thinking on norms and IOM as a ‘norm-entrepreneur’ to argue that understanding the IOM as a diplomatic organisation rather than one that engages in technocratic/global governance (Bakewell 2008; Czaika, de Haas, and Villares‐Varela 2018; Hammar et al. 2021) might be a fruitful way to engage with how it encounters governments and other actors outside of the Global North. This is the basis on which we then problematise the language of beneficiary-ownership.

Recently, a number of scholars have observed how the IOM engages in policy-making without being seen to engage in formal norm-setting by essentially carving out problems to which it then offers solutions. Şahin (2021) for example shows how narratives – a particular way of telling specific stories concerning aspects of migration – structure knowledge that bears upon geopolitical relationships. Green and Pécoud (2022) present evidence about how the IOM colonises ‘trigger narratives’, notably using narratives about trafficking, smuggling and illegal mobility. The IOM does this in part by delegitimizing certain logics, e.g. in relation to refugees and flight, making sure that a language of migration is prioritised which is constructed based on a different logic and therefore grounded in other policy mechanisms (Oelgemöller 2011). In this way the organisation can argue that migration is only a problem if it is unmanaged (Schriever 2022; see also UN General Assembly: New York Declaration and GCM 2018), and hence that policy needs to be established everywhere since all countries have now graduated to being origin, transit and receiving countries of migration and hence all countries need to regulate all aspects of migration (IOM 2019).

By framing people mobility in these terms, it is possible to make sense of IOM as norm-entrepreneur (Geiger and Pécoud 2020; Rother 2019). Based on its institutional set up, mandate and position, IOM is unhindered by the formal ethical and legal constraints that guide, for example, the UNHCR and the ILO – both UN organisations that have been vital in providing formal norms regarding the international mobility of human beings (Guild and Grant 2017). However, Frowd (2018) shows how the IOM goes to enormous lengths in both its communications and relations to situate itself firmly within international legal instruments and emphasise the importance of consistency in their application. What the IOM does is to position itself as a facilitator, problem solver and provider of technical and scientific expertise based on, but beyond the formal norms guiding the conduct of other international organisations. Situating the IOM historically shows that this is its over-riding default position consistently drawn on since its inception in the 1950s: it has always understood itself as a service provider for its member states, most notably those who are majoritarian white (Bradley 2022). IOM acts as norm-entrepreneur for its own practices and to help establish other governing entities, such as national governments, to establish and embed similar norms.

The mechanisms of norm-entrepreneurship are varied. Existing research discusses some of those as technological, but does not set this into relation diplomatically. Bartels (2022) describes how IOM moves into definitionally vacant spaces and floods them with their studies and handbooks. As such, it creates the problems it then engages in solving (Singler 2021). Yet this is not coercion. IOM needs – and can rely on – willing collaborators, as Bartels (2022) shows for North Africa (see also Perrin 2020). As we elaborate below, we have observed this dynamic in West Africa, in government agencies in Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea, and in regional organisations such as the ECOWAS. By invitation, IOM forms and formats; but before it does so, it also – through these practices and interactions – establishes the logic that, in order to be a respected player in the field, a government – these days – needs to have a migration policy (and not just border management policies and police training, see e.g. Frowd 2018). In this way the truth that migration policy is needed is indisputably established and IOM provides framing and content to be drawn on.

The above literature engages in one way or another with what Merlingen (2003) identifies as the ‘molecular’ form of power of IGOs. Molecular power here is different from power-relations as conceptualised in realist thinking as a simplistic ‘power-over’. Rather it is power that circulates through banal encounters and activities. We are informed by this learning, by specifically problematising the notion of beneficiary-ownership. This notion is a discursive construction, and articulation of a relationship. The literature drawn on above only implicitly engages with the kind of diplomacy with which IOM makes and solves problems and experiments with and on migration policymaking. What we have observed is that much of IOM’s practice, beyond that discussed above, is approached in the literature by a global governance approach assuming technocracy (Ashutosh and Mountz 2011; Robinson 2018). However, there are two reasons why IOM’s conduct might more fruitfully be understood as subjectional and diplomatic in character.

First there is a more classically understood legacy of diplomacy in the organisation’s relationships and therefore zones of encounter. The negotiations of governments that constituted the organisation were not just a phenomenon of the Cold War but also one of a world that enabled white settler realities in Latin America and South Africa (Bradley 2022). The governments setting up the organisation that is the IOM today were explicitly racist as Bradley (2022) shows through her archival research. Such a past reverberates today, despite diversification of membership. Accepting this contention is a basis and starting point for our thinking about the relationships which then become important as power, knowledge and practices circulate and unfold. These reverberations are also important in understanding how the IOM is aware of the need to carefully negotiate diplomatic relations, in an environment marked by colonial history and its legacies (Hesse 2004). Such a legacy, is reflected in the call of Adamson and Tsourapas (2019) for ‘migration diplomacy’ to be used in the study of migration. Yet there is a need to go beyond an outlook rooted in a logic of classic diplomacy in which the state is the most significant actor and geographical situatedness is essentialised to a point. Thus, whilst Adamson and Tsourapas pick up on important changes in how ‘the international’ relates to and goes about regulating mobility, it is possible to go further. This leads to the other reason why IOM’s conduct might be more plausibly understood as diplomatic.

Diplomatic standing, secondly, is not straightforward in the context of an international organisation such as the IOM – in particular now that it is a United Nations (UN) related organisation. The Charter of the United Nations stipulates that the UN and its organisations ‘shall enjoy […] such legal capacity as may be necessary for the exercise of its functions and the fulfilment of its purposes’ (Article 104, Charter of the UN, 2022). Article 105 provides the same for privileges and immunities. In other words, the juridical personality of the IOM is functional, but its actions are much more happenstance. Adler-Nissen and Drieschova (2019) discuss how shareability and immediacy of information change diplomatic practices, by introducing informality, forming new identities, and engaging in meaning-making within a complex organisation where neither identities nor meanings can easily be contained. This is important especially in the context of applying the notion of subjectional diplomacy to our analysis further below because it begs the question how it is legitimate to intervene in the policymaking of a political region or a national government when IOM engages in drafting and validating relevant pieces of legislation. One easy answer is as follows: by invitation, as is shown in the analysis below. Every state has the sovereign right to invite (UN) experts to help it in despatching its duties. Yet, aside from legal detail, the political dynamics that play into these diplomatic relationships matter.

International Organizations, such as bodies of the UN system, can act as a legal personality and holder of diplomatic capacity (Finnemore and Barnett 2004). More than that, there is a clear mandate through the 2030 Agenda which outlines the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and more recently through UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution (A/RES/71/1, also often called the New York Declaration) to build ‘active, accountable and inclusive institutions’ (UN 2030 Agenda), including in the context of regulating the mobility of people. The SDGs and the New York Declaration on which the Global Compacts for Migration and Refugees rest are political intentions. They are drafted such that there is ownership of acting (by e.g. IGOs or governemtnas identified as receiving) and ownership of being acted upon (e.g. by governments identified as sending or transit countries), even if the declarations are carried by all involved (Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018).

It seems that beyond the right to represent, based on invitation by the country in which the IOM is active, there is an assumption about being fully consulted, submitting, advocating for and negotiating proposals, including making decisions regarding the development of legal instruments that may potentially affect the lives and practices of people within that country and beyond (Constantinou and McConnell 2023, 6). In short, there is an assumption of subjectional diplomacy, to which we will now turn by outlining our methodology and, in particular, our analytical toolbox, to then engage with notions of beneficiary-ownership.

The Methodology

The research project that this contribution is based on was framed through a discourse theoretical understanding of the world. Stengel and Nabers (2019, 250) summarise that ‘the framework is intended not merely to describe social change but to explain how particular discursive positions […] manage to become meaningful […] or even widely accepted as (factually) “true” or (morally) “right” thus (hegemonic)’ or objective. Objectivity is the result of contingent processes in which a diversity of actors engage in struggles over strategies of meaning-making and fixing despite ambiguity (Howarth 2000). Language is hence never totally fixed. In the same vein, society and identity are also flexible and changeable. The material aspects of the world very much exist in discourse, but do not possess meaning independently. Instead, once materiality is articulated or rendered meaningful through discourse, its significance becomes intelligible (Laclau 2014). Articulation, then, is central to Discourse Theory. Articulation is the idea that meaning is given to the world by combining and connecting words, objects and ideas in particular ways when discourse is spoken and enacted in encounter. Articulations in their repetition thus constitute the social world (Marchart 2014). The IOM is situated within and acts on the social world of migration policymaking which is peopled by institutional actors, imaginations about migrants and those people who are assigned those identities. These relationships are asymmetric in encounter, knowledge and process.

What the character is of such asymmetry and how this plays out will be illuminated by drawing on the notion of subjectional diplomacy as a more practical conceptual tool (Constantinou and McConnell 2023, 15). We contend that the humanitarian, migration and development industries more broadly intervene in African countries in such subjectional ways. The IOM, by emphasising its self-defined identity as a humble solution provider and facilitator, gives particular meaning to the notion of ‘beneficiary-led’ policy-making that is to end in ‘beneficiary-owned’ policy. Such discursive moves are often justified under the banner of capacity-building. These moves are neither benign, nor however are they necessarily coercively imposed. It is important to understand reciprocity to clarify the idea of subjectional diplomacy as an explanation for what IOM accomplishes in West African migration policy-making when it employs the notion of beneficiary-ownership.

Reciprocity is important in diplomatic relations. How reciprocity in encounters and relationships is asymmetrically constructed is important too, especially in the context of encounters between European and West African officials. There is a pattern to such encounters: historically this is illustrated by Pratt (2008). Superficially the narrative of the white explorers, who eventually would colonise, was discovery and engagement, with the purpose of finding common interest and mutual advantage. Pratt (2008) draws on archival material to evidence that in the European pre-colonial narrative, African knowledge and agency is noted, just as IOM today notes capacity for ‘beneficiary-led’ activity. However, at the same time white explorers are (self)-portrayed as upright people whose agency for good is beyond question. By contrast, however, implying that agency in the case of Africans may well be dubious. Historically, it is this logic that justified the claim that the white man needed to civilise. Pratt (2008, 83) calls this an attitude of anti-conquest: the white man constructs himself as the upright, civilised European – who encounters Africa not with the goal of conquest as such, but with a civilising mission.

The IOM establishes itself as the actor who has expertise to provide solutions on the basis of knowing ‘best-practice’ and thus is legitimised to intervene in Africa. As we show in the analysis below, this imposition is not without negotiation and hence alteration. Power is asymmetric and not unilinear. Reciprocity in the context of subjectional diplomacy is then a very defined phenomenon. As Pratt notes, ‘while subjugated peoples cannot readily control what the dominant culture visits upon them, they do determine to varying extends what they absorb into their own, how they use it, and what they make it mean’ (Pratt 2008, 7). Today the language of best practice and knowledge-sharing fulfils much the same purpose when humanitarian and migration industries encounter those assessed to be beneficiaries. Encounters are thus embedded in knowledge and negotiations about which knowledges are intelligible and legitimate.

The socio-political ordering of colonialism in almost all countries that now form the post-colonial world was established especially through religious missions of different Christian denominations. Europeans represented themselves as ‘ambassadors of Christ’ (Constantinou and McConnell 2023; see also Opondo 2010) with the mission to subject the peoples of Africa. Europeans did so by establishing the knowledges and truths they brought as redemptive of old and sinful African ways of conducting their affairs and life.

Redemptive knowledge is one mechanism through which subjectional diplomacy is conducted. We show below how the IOM offers different forms of ‘redemptive knowledge’ to intervene in policymaking as it concerns the mobility of people. In the context of colonisation, European ways and values were established as intelligible, legitimate and of civilisational importance. The attitude with which such ambassadors came was that the ‘new European knowledge’ which was ‘offered’ was better in every way. The missionaries and ambassadors thus formulated the problem and the solution. The IOM subtly makes similar claims to offering solutions to the problem of international migration as it has constructed the problem itself.

As such we follow a methodology that is based on articulations to understand the logics that are drawn on and circulated by the IOM, their partner institutions and those who encounter it. This is the zone of encounter, where countries, such as those of Europe, and their development and migration agencies as donors and experts, meet governments and countries such as those in West Africa, along with some of their civil society organisations, as ‘beneficiaries’.

The data for this paper was collected in the context of research carried out for the ‘Safety, Support and Solutions: Phase 2’ (SSSII) programme running between 2017 and 20,221 funded by DFID (now FCDO) and implemented by IOM with other partners. The research programme was aimed at gaining understanding about mobility decisions in a context in which much of West Africa experiences interventions that jointly target migration and development. These interventions cascade from regional ECOWAS negotiations and policy-making, to national governments and into implementation.

The way Europe ‘civilises’ or ‘domesticates’ human mobility in West Africa is via explicitly operational organisations, such as the ICMPD and, in our case specifically, the IOM, as they have intervened in Freedom of Movement regulations at the level of the ECOWAS. To understand these encounters and logics circulated, our data included archival material as well as transcripts of interviews with officials of regional organisations that focus on freedom of movement as well as policymakers at the national level and those implementing programme at the operational sub-national level.

An interdisciplinary team comprising geographers, anthropologists and political scientists worked alongside the broader SSSII programme. We undertook archival and documentary data collection from mainly IOM archives but also national archives in our three focus countries. Fieldwork was conducted by the authors and a small group of research assistants, between July 2019 and March 2021. The implementation sites selected ranged from the peripheries of the three capital cities of Dakar, Banjul and Conakry to more remote rural areas. We conducted in total 56 interviews with community leaders, NGO and government officials in Senegal (10), Guinea (9) and The Gambia (12), as well as with IOM, ILO, ICMPD and European national aid agency officials (25). Interviews were conducted in French and English. The 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic meant that most interviews with officials were conducted online. The interviews ranged in approach from more formal direct questions to thematic conversations.

The positionalities involved here are complex and would deserve a lengthy discussion in their own right. We as European passport-holding researchers, encountered, equally priviledged people employed by organisations that hire on international wages and provide elite-status; unless, of course they hire on national contracts. Of the 25 interviews conducted at this political level, we knowingly only encountered one person on a ‘local’ contract. More interesting however, is that we encountered several junior people of European or North American citizenship, who were yet again a differently and challengingly situated. The two female white interviewers encountered three interview situations were power played out along gendered lines, of the three situations misogynistic attitudes were displayed also by one female interviewee, not just by older men. The situation of our post-doc researchers was yet again different, they were from within the countries on European post-doc commensurate sallaries interviewing governmental officials in the country of which they are passport-holders. The interviews ran to gendered lines of communication, in which our male researchers were treated with more respect than the female researcher, even though she was the one with the highest qualification.

For this article we argue that the civilising mission has been replaced with a professionalising mission, implemented by actors such as IOM. The rhetoric of civilisation was Europe’s way to legitimise colonialism, just as today’s superior knowledge allows donors to legitimise their intervention. This apparently ‘superior’ knowledge is what we call redemptive knowledge, and a manifestation of it is the narrative of beneficiary ownership. We argue that redemptive knowledge is a tool through which subjectional diplomacy is enacted. African actors react by altering this space of subjectional diplomacy.¹ The next four analytical sections will develop our problematisation of beneficiary-ownership across four stages, drawing on the tools outlined above.

‘Beneficiary-Led’ Policy-Making: The Institutional and Regulatory Context

National-level migration policy is developed in a wider context of institutional and regime entanglements (Bisong 2019). These have a short history, reaching back to the early 2000s. At that time there was an impetus to build what came to be called regional consultative processes on migration (RCPs). The one for West Africa is called MIDWA, the Migration Dialogue for West Africa. Co-terminus was a development pushed by the, now, African Union (AU) to develop principles on the freedom of movement of Africans within Africa. For the West African region, these were codified as containing entry provisions, residence provisions and provisions for the right to establishment. This articulation of freedom of movement differs somewhat from ideas expressed by West Africans at the point of independence from colonialism, where pre-colonial histories were drawn on to imagine freedom of movement as very much more open and fluid (Preamble of the Treaty of Lagos, 1975, No. 14843; see also Mbembe 2021).

MIDWA is a creation of the IOM. It is described as a platform for ECOWAS countries to discuss any and all of the varied elements linked to migration and the regulation of human mobility. At the time of its creation in the early 2000s it was felt – and the abstracted passive of this expression is intentional as one of our interviewees² emphasised – that discussions around migration and efforts at policy-making lacked motivation on the part of West African countries. As such FMM West Africa, the short name for the multi-agency project Support to Free Movement of Persons and Migration in West Africa, was conceived and began to be implemented. The aim of FMM West Africa was to operationalise and implement West Africa’s freedom of movement protocol and, from 2008, to work towards a common approach on migration in the region. Both would bring about the establishment of country-level migration policies for member states. In the language of international organisations, it was to harmonise, review and develop policy that was regional in scope, at the same time as being demand-driven.³

ECOWAS colleagues are vocal that this is relevant not only because a wider notion of freedom of movement resonates in West Africa.⁴ A focus on freedom of movement is also relevant because its articulation requires not just who can move, but also which other categories of mobility there are that may not be legitimate. We see here beginnings of how redemptive knowledge works: alternative versions of freedom of movement are not as good as the knowledge that is offered by the EU and European donor countries. In addition, the IOM can facilitate the implementation of this superior knowledge, which then needs more detailed articulations at the level of national regulation of mobility; and, hence, the need for migration policy is added. Here too, the IOM can help with superior knowledge, where previously the governments had not seen the necessity to regulate mobility in quite the way as is proposed now. This background is important as it betrays some of the influence imposed when the EU and ECOWAS officials engage in the region on migration policy constructions.

Needless to say, the kind of knowledge promoted also helped to implement the EU’s ideas about how its neighbourhood was to ‘manage migration’, including the wider regional provisions about freedom of movement as right to enter, settle and establish and the attendant data collection. It thus included the ability to differentiate between seemingly legitimate and illegitimate mobility as performed by European governmental agencies. This meant national governments would log demand with IOM, which in turn would then coordinate with the ICMPD and ILO in the first instance about what support with EU funding could be leveraged. The project was to complete in 2018 but funding was extended to August 2020. Institutionally, there were two objectives. One was to build capacity within ECOWAS to take over this kind of work independently at the conclusion of the funding cycle. The other was to overcome the sluggish development of policy-making encountered 20 years earlier to ensure national governments had ‘appropriate’ policy and more generally professionalisation through technical assistance.⁵

In this context, interview participants identified their approach to facilitating policy-making as ‘beneficiary-led, to achieve beneficiary-ownership’.⁶ To be marked out as a ‘beneficiary’ indicates a different kind of relationship. It is a relationship that is much more unequal than even the regulated inequality found between a government and a supporting organisation in which the government in question is not only assumed to be independent in its decision-making and action on paper, but also in fact. Turning the notion of beneficiary around by adding ‘-led and -owned’ renders any relationship nonsensical. Indeed, it might be understood as an outright cynical expression on the part of the IOM or governments of Europe, in this case. However, our interviewees were not cynical, far from it. They are concerned individuals. Equally, government officials and West African NGOs are people with a vision of Africa to be regarded and respected as nuanced and valued. It is here where we begin to glimpse the challenges of reciprocity discussed above.

Set against the above narrative of IOM and ECOWAS collaboration with members of the ECOWAS who were identified as ‘in need’ of having a dedicated country-level migration policy is an array of other narratives. These generally approach migration policy-making from a perspective informed by bilateralism, in which the ECOWAS is hardly visible, but the IOM increasingly hyper-visible. For example, Guinea had drafted a migration policy in 2008, but this had not been actively pursued any further until the IOM resumed their activities in the country. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Guineans Abroad drafted it in 2008 but it was abandoned after the country suffered political and institutional turmoil and eventually regime change. As stated in a report carried out by consultants for IOM Nigeria following an identification mission to support the development of Migration Profiles in West Africa, ‘the government has not demonstrated strong willingness to design a new migration policy, although the IOM Guinea office has set up a roadmap leading to the design of such policy’ (Altaï Consulting 2016, 72).

This lack of enthusiasm seems to be shared by many governments of the region. Relations between governments and national and international agencies are very different depending on how established cooperation is. Despite its long presence in Senegal (the IOM Dakar Office opened in 1998), IOM has to ‘compete’ with EU member states’ agencies (from France, the former colonial power, but also the Belgian, Luxembourg, German, Spanish and Italian development agencies) who have had a long-standing presence in the country, a strong operational experience and relations with governmental bodies. Obstacles to collaborating with the IOM are identified, but such views are based on informal chats both within but also outside of IOM. None of these narratives about the IOM are productive, but they do circulate more or less openly spoken. There are three narratives, and all of them need to be taken with a great deal of scepticism: one sees IOM as a bulldozer imposing their single-mindedness, another sees the IOM as an organisation that over-promises and under-delivers, while a third narrative is that IOM’s work is too superficial, i.e. they don’t know what they are doing and work done by older and more established entities is more sustainable and normatively acceptable.

By contrast, in The Gambia and Guinea,⁷ where cooperation with International Organizations such as the IOM is a more recent development, IOM’s engagement is more directly facilitated through implementation of activities funded under the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) targeting areas of governing migration, such that IOM is now a prominent partner to national governments. As one interviewee from a government put it:

It must be said, in reality, that international, bi- and multilateral organisations, states and associations are working in a really effective way, in terms of accompanying and assisting in the fight against illegal migration and the promotion of regular migration. And among all these organisations, the organisation that is closest to the Guinean state, to the Guinean government, and which creates accompanying, supporting and training relationships, is the International Organisation for Migration⁸

IOM in this way becomes the information and data provider, teacher, and drafter of situation reports. It provides the language and the frames of intelligibility. However, this relationship can appear, even in the eyes of the government themselves, very unbalanced, and far from the image of partnership, facilitation and service provision the IOM is at pains to portray:

the international organisations are for us - it’s even become a fixed thing in our heads - these organisations are our funders [laughs] You understand? And we are the executors, that’s it …… international organisations finance but we are the executors. Do you understand? Each side gets something out of it, but we execute, and often we give a hand to the international organisations⁹

This consciousness of ‘giving a hand’, of being the little helper is both devastating and comfortable. It is devastating because it undermines, but it is comfortable because it absolves from responsibility. It is this contradictory relationship that the concept of subjectional diplomacy helps to explain. It implies reciprocity and humility but enacts a very different relationship: one that resonates with contemporary logics such as ‘win-win’. However, deeply embedded, this sits uncomfortably as it cannot hide dependency, if not domination, thus giving the lie to notions of equality and independence.

Talking about the process of developing a migration policy in the Gambia, one official representing a European organisation commented:

It is difficult because they are not used to working like Senegal, people used to work, or at least to cooperate with international organisations. Everything has to be learned here, it’s very difficult to… it hasn’t really gelled in The Gambia, we are working for the beginning of a migration policy, but it is very very difficult¹⁰

The differentiation of the countries here is significant, a tactic that has been used during colonial times too. Whether meant in this way or not, a comparison about who is more civilised, or in our context more professional, also implies where the need to teach is greater at the same time as questioning whether there is capacity to learn. This sends signals to those unfortunate enough that they have to learn everything to comply: conform and do not let the effort down. It shows the process of establishing and acting on redemptive knowledge.

How the IOM Positions Itself and Interacts

As analysed in the section above, the IOM positions itself as the lead agency, in conjunction with ECOWAS, to support governments to achieve their own national migration policy. Frowd notes in the context of border management that ‘at the level of the everyday procedures, [… IOM] proposes workplans based on member’s border management needs, while remaining sensitive to local priorities, and are careful about not overstepping their bounds in relations to what local governments will allow’ (Frowd 2018, 1662). In our observations this holds true also for wider areas of migration policy-making.

It is at this point where the notion of reciprocity is helpful for analysis. Reciprocity would have it that IOM officials, as Frowd indicates, are aware of the knowledges, capacities and limits of the countries in which they work. However, IOM as an organisation side-steps this diplomatic problematic by proposing generalised blueprints for what best practice in national policy-making apparently looks like. A blueprint is available for both process and content. This way, a tokenistic respect can be upheld for the government in question, while still imposing meanings and approaches to policy-making that would otherwise be rejected. Notably, these blueprints are not, in the end, strategically developed; rather they are an instance of happenstance copied and pasted across countries of implementation and altered along the way (much in the way that Butler (2004) elaborates the idea of performance). This is despite the impression given by IOM that these blueprints are a representation of what might be understood as the ultimate (redemptive) and hence rational knowledge to help governments in need.

One ECOWAS officer, for example, explained that the late inclusion of gender awareness in migration policymaking was a good example of ad hoc ‘blueprinting’. Once the issue of gender became intelligible and therefore was deemed important, it made it not just into discussions and onto the agenda, but it was also woven into the wider discourse and pushed extensively when IOM interacted with governments based on its blueprint approach to making migration policy. It is this capacity for haphazard happening which is instantly integrated into seemingly purpose-led processes that characterises blueprinting in this context. The phenomenon of performing rationality when this really was not an orchestrated development is relevant when thinking about the function that the idea of ‘beneficiary-led’ policy-making plays. It gives substance to the notion of subjectional diplomacy and how the blue-prints are filled with meaning.

One mechanism for filling blueprints with substantial meaning is by establishment of country migration profiles. Indeed, it is through IOM’s activities in the area of migration governance, data collection and analysis that the organisation has gained the most direct contact with a whole range of government departments and CSOs dealing with migration through establishing national coordination frameworks. As part of their activities to develop national Migration Profiles (funded under the FMM West Africa programme), inter-ministerial committees were set up and government departments had to designate focal points which would be the main interlocutors for the IOM and the consultants hired to produce these profiles. In parallel, national coordination frameworks involving government departments, CSOs and researchers were set up by the IOM as part of the consultative process leading to the development of national migration policies in the three countries.

The IOM, for example, developed Terms of References (ToR) in Senegal for four thematic working groups (migration, data management, economy and employment; migration, human rights and gender; migration, health and environment; and migration and border management). Each of these ToR already span more than 20 pages and include an outline of the ‘methodology’ stipulating that each group have a president, a vice-president, a rapporteur and a secretariat. A consultant was to accompany the process and relevant civil society groups for each theme were to be integrated to help ‘formulate observations and constructive feedback’ (IOM, ToR, page 20, document 20200807_135004). The Senegalese thematic groups began to report in the first quarter of 2016. The reports were lengthy, fairly exhaustive and were followed up by some financial planning. The language is familiar from IOM and EU publications on policy areas relating to international migration, as the phenomenon is viewed from the positionality of a European policy-maker. What is relevant here is that this system circulates knowledge in such a way that the superior knowledge does not have to be imposed starkly but is nonetheless infused and as such dictates what the legitimate way of thinking and expressing is.

In 2017 a ‘validation workshop’ was held and a report was drafted containing a plan of action to implement the national migration policy. In a ceremony, the consultant introduced the plan, this was followed by the presentation of thematic working group reports all with flags and official seals to ensure that all understood this was the government’s will and IOM, if in appearance at all, the humble facilitator. The actual instrument seems to be secondary at best in all this activity. As one observer has commented:

Since 2018, Senegal has had a so-called migration policy, which was drafted by initiative and with the funding of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and has still not been validated politically. Former minister and former Deputy Director-General of the IOM Ndioro Ndiaye spoke scathingly of the paper in early September: ‘it is not even a policy, it is a compendium of projects!’

(Ziegelmayer 2020)

The processes in Guinea and The Gambia were slower, not just for the (geo)political circumstances of change and transformation. Guinea is interesting for the exchange that started off the process that was concluded in the Senegal at roughly the same time. In November 2016 a member of staff of the IOM wrote in English to a Guinean contact, copying a host of people, as follows:

As you all know we are in the process of developing national migration profiles in the ECOWAS Member States and Mauritania. […] As we commence this process, we kindly seek your kind assistance to request from the coordinating authority (as regards migration) in your country a letter of request for FMM West Africa support in the development of the national migration profile. This letter will serve as a justification of our intervention and also demonstrate government ownership of the process.

(IOM, November 2016, document 2020-08-04 14.01.47)

The letter was duly responded to by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Guineans Abroad in January 2017 to the IOM representative. The answer came in French as the formal national language in Guinea, which in itself is indicative of the wrangling over reciprocation: ‘Nous venons auprès de votre institution soliciter votre appu pour l’élaboration d’un document de politique migratoire’ (Authors’ translation: (Guinea, January 2017, document 20200805_160710)).¹¹ Not just a profile, but a migration policy. The letter goes on to elaborate the situation in Guinea regarding migration and to list that the only law it has is an instrument from 1994 concerning immigration and the ECOWAS instruments. Guinea now needs a migration policy for strategic purposes. The letter closes with a reference to the common objectives and that this process should engage all relevant key actors, including civil society and international organisations (Guinea, January 2017, document 20200805_160710).

It is striking how the notion of sovereignty is utterly irrelevant in these interactions, except for the more formal request by IOM to be invited, which had the expected response – though in the formal language of the country, rather than in the language the request was posed. It is also striking how demands were made for inclusion of those groups generally identified as ‘stakeholders’ by the donor industry dealing with humanitarian, aid, development and migration issues. A contact zone is established, most notably a hierarchy that cannot be named or seen. These observations then lead us to ask what other techniques are that are used in these diplomatic relations.

Redemptive Knowledge and Technologies of Engagement

The relationships displayed in these exchanges are interesting for the role that IOM places itself in. Solicitously supporting in the absence of capacity? Patronisingly pushing where need is, even though this wasn’t independently identified by the country in question? Meekly implementing a mandate it was given by EU and ECOWAS member-states? That much of the IOM staff is ‘local’ and mostly ‘junior’ and that governments are keen to be seen to be collaborative is important (Dini 2018). These factors combine to facilitate not just IOM’s autonomous ‘acting’ in the field, but impacts also on the subjectional diplomacy that unfolds in the relationships between IOM and those governments who ostensibly lead the processes aimed to arrive at a national migration policy, but do not have the option to ‘opt-out’ of being a beneficiary. There are two ways in which the IOM approaches their involvement: on the one hand through modes of knowledge management, such that they offer specialised knowledge which is then taken on board and turned into an exclusionary discourse of truth; and on the other via particular modes of engagement throughout the process of policy-making, which also sediments the knowledge offered.

One mechanism deployed by IOM in its policy-development activity is that it has always been ready to react to what governments task the organisation with. The IOM has been working towards establishing a catalogue that makes up eligible migration issues since it instituted the ACP-EU Dialogue on Migration and Development in 2000.¹² Governments, in our case Guinea, Senegal and The Gambia, are informed about that list from a myriad of handbooks and reports as well as training material disseminated. These eligible issues are vetted by both donor and receiving countries to be consistent for donor funding. One popular theme is ‘climate change and migration’ – whether or not that is relevant in the particular context of a specific country. The common approach adopted by the ECOWAS in 2008 draws on this knowledge and is vital. It constitutes the ‘methodology’ to negotiate between eligible migration issues and the national contexts in which mobility does or does not happen and is or is not regulated, in addition to ensuring interoperability between the governments of the region.¹³

What is noteworthy is that the EUTF has instituted a similar and parallel process to the MIDWA process. In Senegal, in 2019, the IOM was the initiator, together with the Swiss embassy, of a series of bimonthly meetings called the ‘International Working Group on Migration in West Africa’ where all the EUTF-funded national and international organisations were invited to participate. These meetings were organised around a different theme each time (e.g. return, or skills training and the labour market). This allowed the different partners to learn about the activities of other actors. Such initiatives facilitate communication and ‘knowledge exchange’ among actors involved in migration. As much of the activities around migration in West Africa centre around practices long established by the development industry, some development actors welcomed these meetings. Learning – at least of a shared vocabulary – is had not just on the part of migration and development professionals, but also for IOM in its quest to manage both migration and information.

A shared vocabulary helps to define problems that can then be constructed as common and in need of solutions. These modes of knowledge management, given they come with international funding, go some way for governments of the region to engage in establishing migration profiles, migration policies and plans of action as they all train their gaze.¹⁴ Through national migration profiles, the IOM have established themselves as a ‘one stop shop’ for migration knowledge, not only in contexts where such data are lacking. The language used influences the way human mobility is thought about and conceptualised by a large array of actors. IOM is thus positioned in the place of holding the equivalent of redemptive knowledge that missionaries had during colonial times. Acting as an influential reference point means reciprocation is tokenistic and knowledge management subjectional rather than co-produced. Other ways of seeing and acting on the world become difficult. The disseminated ‘common’ knowledge points towards and justifies a particular order that follows.

Probably the most widely discussed example in practice is return. As the EU progressively decided to include quotas for return migrants into EUTF-funded programmes in the region, the implementers of such programmes – national aid agencies and NGOs – have had little choice but to collaborate, however reluctantly, with the IOM, which became a kind of ‘provider’ of returnees for those programmes. Money matters. This fact was mentioned by many aid agency representatives we spoke to.

… the ‘post return’ let’s say, everything that comes immediately after the return, so it’s not reintegration understood in the way of development which is on the long term, socio-cultural, political, economic reintegration, etc. but here, you see the first danger that, in my opinion, […], which is a danger of vocabulary. We started to use words that have different meanings in different contexts as if everyone meant the same thing by these words. […] It doesn’t have the same implications and so on. […] because six-month reintegration packages for a development agency don’t mean anything¹⁵

The observation that a concept can mean different things to different people is important in the context of knowledge management: the more something is defined, the less clear it becomes, as it always needs reference to a myriad of other concepts in order to become intelligible. The massive collection of data IOM that pushes to their beneficiaries (and the research community) helps that process of emptiness – the majority of people using the data and especially the data digests have no opportunity to scrutinise how the data was collected, how it was ‘cleaned’, analysed and interpreted. The continuous repetition of sloganistically packaged information is then a next step in disseminating the knowledge that is made and circulated: whether that is that ‘states have the right to choose who enters their territory’ – this is not without limitation; or an emphasis on the dangers of illegally migrating, this says nothing of the violence or negligence of countries who have made migration journeys a lot more dangerous than they used to be. Knowledge informs action and policies guide action and enforcement which in turn verifies and sediments such knowledge.

From Beneficiary-Led Policy-Making to Beneficiary-Ownership

Above we have shown the mechanisms used to make up ‘beneficiary-led’ policymaking in migration. In this last analytical step, we shed light on what beneficiary-ownership turns out to be in the process of migration policymaking as we have encountered it. When beginning to learn about the process that led to the national migration policies in West Africa we heard from one senior official situated within the diplomatic community in Abuja and involved in FMM that the most important element is to inculcate ‘beneficiary-ownership’.¹⁶ In practice, many actors in the field are annoyed by IOM’s tendency to invest in fields of action in which they have no particular experience or expertise. This has been referred to in the literature as ‘turf war’ (Bradley 2020, 115), but is actually a little more complicated than a straightforward relationship of competition. As one representative of an EU member state commented: ‘Maybe [the IOM] should stop at what they know how to do… But the problem is that if they stopped at what they know how to do, they wouldn’t have the budgets and if there are no budgets, then they don’t have a business model… well, that’s it’.¹⁷ In this context we observe with Bradley (2020) that a programme’s outcome seems often to matter less than ensuring constant presence and activity. This is often justified by IOM itself because they see a vacuum which they can move into in order to offer a problem narrative and a solution. One of our interviewees working in the development sector describes the situation as follows:

Yes, well I think that there is a very strong attempt to divert national policies, to use them as instruments. Besides, it’s ministries, it’s agencies that are often weak, when you’re dealing with a ministry for Senegalese abroad or the Senegalese abroad department. We’re not dealing with a big sectoral ministry like, I don’t know, the ministry of education, the economy and finance or health. So it’s also the people, that’s it… […]. Yes, so I think it’s quite, there’s an instrumentalisation… I think… Well, there’s not a balanced dialogue. How do we position ourselves? Well, first of all we try to do concrete things, not just blah, blah, blah, workshops, things and capacity building, but we never see the results and so on¹⁸

Subjectional diplomacy is the concept that lets us understand best the quality of such unbalanced dialogue. How this is brought about is referred to as ‘blah, blah, blah’ - it is a kind of ‘hyperactivism’ that has allowed the IOM country offices to establish numerous links with governmental and non-governmental organisations as discussed above. What is crucial here is that these relationships mean IOM can ask ‘to be invited’ and develop policy, guidance, action plans and even budgets. Thus, on invitation, a concept note would be developed along with a budget and an agenda. The ECOWAS represented by its Freedom of Movement Directorate would then invite relevant government officials, IOM would bring these together and would hire a resource person who would be responsible for the facilitation and drafting process. All this is done in meetings, creating much note-taking but often little meaningful interaction. It is significant how IOM justifies pushing for invitations by governments for them to draft policy. The argument is that this way it is assured that national policy is linked to the wider architecture of policies in the field of governing mobility.

Once the resource person has drafted the policy based on universalised expressions of knowledge there is a degree of engagement by the relevant country for which the policy is developed as it enters a process of technical and ministerial review; this is co-facilitated by IOM and the ECOWAS. The effect of this process is that many of the country-level ministries now have migration-expert positions (focal points), who are both treated as learners and experts by the regional and international actors. These learner experts are fully aware of their positionality, engaging in the processes of subjectional diplomacy: asked by one of our national government interviewees if they felt European governments or IOM have influenced the common approach that has been taken by ECOWAS, the answer was clear:

Generally there is Agenda settings […]. Sometimes the International Community will have an interest that will not be your interest. So it’s up to you to look at what is, what is that they are interested, that is not of national interest to me, and then you negotiate based on that. And then you get good package for something that you would benefit from. So for them they are concerned that people should not go, or where they should go, the best should go so that they can participate to their National development. For us, our concern is people are already there supporting, they will contribute on our families, […], so I think this is our concern in any sort of negotiation. What one has to look at it from that context and create the win-win situation¹⁹

There is another side to this relationship. Government officials are experienced by some in international organisations – including IOM – as unprofessional and grasping. It is not a misunderstanding, but rather the difference of priority where one actor is focussed on getting a job done and the other on a diplomatic relationship more formally. On completion of the review process, a draft policy enters a process of validation. The review and validation process is regarded as particularly onerous by both ECOWAS and IOM for the demands made by national government representatives – especially when ministers are involved – relating to travel, accommodation and ceremony. In these exchanges, articulations of beneficiary-ownership are revealed as empty. Beneficiaries are to conform to expectations, in terms of validating and signing the relevant policies. There is little patience for ceremony and the non-tokenistic reciprocity that diplomatic relationships require.

In turn, once a policy is agreed, training and capacity building plans are part of the package which should then guide dissemination and implementation.²⁰ But in this way, IOM reaches back to information management to influence the wider discourses. This echoes Aguillon’s (2020) observation that information campaigns aimed at preventing irregular migration, like the ones conducted by the IOM in the three countries, frame public debates and the narrative of a broad range of actors, even those with a critical stance. IOM has for instance normalised the dichotomy between regular/irregular migrants and the notion of ‘potential migrant’ in training and capacity-building (anonymous, internal evaluation report related to the MIGCHOICE project). Such narratives and framings of migratory movements are further disseminated in the many capacity building workshops that the IOM propose to governmental and non-governmental organisations.²¹ These workshops socialise governmental officials and CSO representatives to understand and talk about international migration in a certain way and to link them to other issues like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It turns out then that the IOM might well be regarded as the new missionary – at least in the context of international migration – in that a particular truth is established alongside practices and rituals clouding out other ways of conceiving of mobility and ordering the world.

Conclusion: The multilateral diplomatic space, professionalisation mission and a seemingly shared commons?

We began by contending that the rhetorical device of beneficiary-ownership is expressive of interesting contradictions about who leads and owns processes of migration policy formulation and implementation. The problem we have posed is that making policy in the multilateral diplomatic space is characterised by the legacy of colonial relations. IOM seamlessly slots in, despite expressing sensitivity to the lingering of such power differentials. More often than not, our West African interviewees articulate that the concerns addressed in much formal migration activity are not of their choosing, but that acquiescence to the approaches, ideas and logics held as truth by the donors and organisations of Europe, including IOM, can be had nonetheless. These are then not strictly one-sided dynamics of coercive imposition but negotiated ways of setting boundaries of influence in which those negotiating do not start from a position of equality. Even so, diplomatic relations do encompass rights to communication, representation, standing and negotiation, as discussed by Constantinou and McConnell (2023, 55). It is for this reason that we have employed the notion of subjectional diplomacy.

Interestingly, the language of beneficiary-ownership circulates rarely in print and is mostly used informally in diplomatic and high-level programming circles. The logic that is expressed, however, is woven through much of IOM’s practices. The logic of beneficiary-ownership is not symmetric and organisations, such as the IOM, have much more autonomy than is often accorded to them. This is especially relevant as IOM hold the ‘redemptive’, or in more secular language, the ‘authoritative’ knowledge. The IOM has the power of dissemination of knowledge that is used, replicated and normalised. The civilising mission of the past has become a professionalising mission, that engages in standardising and harmonising of not just knowledge itself, but its production and use. Of course, ultimately power also sits with those who fund the IOM – in Europe and elsewhere.

This power is importantly couched in terms of partnership, aiming to convince observers that there is reciprocity in the relationships. It is also couched in terms of government-led engagement, in which IOM is in a facilitative role throughout the relevant processes, much like notions of anti-conquest in the earlier days of colonialism. Many, not just in the research community, think that these engagements stay insulated at the level of international, regional and to a degree national relationships, without much impact on the ground. Yet, there is impact. African governments identified as in need of migration policy find it easier to submit to international and donor pressure than to stand up for their citizens who are labelled and targeted in often criminalising and securitising ways or to insist on their protection during their national, regional, continental and even sometimes international mobility. Instead, knowledge and language from the Global North is adopted in exchange for what exactly? IOM – and through it, its donors – imparts a particular perspective about the world which is ordered through mobility practices moulding care and control. As in the past, it is not the elites who suffer the consequences.

Such caring and controlling, in which beneficiary-ownership is extended, happens in a series of contact zones: the workshops, the meetings driven by hyperactivity, the engagement of consultants and importantly, the validation ceremonies. Whether by negotiation or obstruction, wilful chaos or non-implementation – all of which can be observed in the countries we have researched – those countries identified as beneficiaries absorb the knowledge and narratives but not exactly in the way presented. Human mobility is domesticated in West Africa by the activities of the EU and international organisations, headed by IOM, by negotiating shared commons, but not perfectly or completely. The commons in this case are not quite as shared as the powerful in the Global North would have it.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ms Gafou Diop, Mr Sait Matty Jaw, Mr Mohamed Sacko and Mr Mory Toure who have supported the data collection in country. We are also grateful to the IOM Team in London to have supported our archival research, as we are grateful to all the anonymous people who gave their time to talk to us and let us learn from them. Finally, we want to say thanks for the very helpful comments received at a workshop in Paris in June 2022 and from our anonymous reviewers and editor. Their support and enthusiasm was very much appreciated.

The data for this paper was collected in the context of research carried out for the ‘Safety, Support and Solutions: Phase 2’ (SSSII) programme running between 2017 and 2021 funded by DFID (now FCDO) and implemented by IOM with other partners. Research Study under Outcome Four of the Safety, Support and Solutions in the Central Mediterranean Route Phase II programme, funded by the Department for International Development (Contract 8322) and implemented by IOM. Ethics approval ERN_19-0742 University of Birmingham, 25 October 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Department for International Development, UK Government .

Notes

1. We would particularly like to acknowledge the active engagement of our reviewer one in making this article stronger at this point. All remaining weaknesses are our responsibility.

2. Interview 02 March 2020, Abuja, Nigeria.

3. Interview, 02 March 2020, Abuja, Nigeria.

4. Interview 03 March 2020(a) Abuja, Nigeria.

5. Interview 02 March 2020 in Abuja, Nigeria and Interviews 04 March 2020(a) and (b) in Abuja, Nigeria.

6. Interview 02 March 2020 in Abuja, Nigeria and Interviews 04 March 2020(a) and (b) in Abuja, Nigeria.

7. IOM country websites indicate that The Gambia office was opened in July 2017 (with an operational presence in the country since 2001) and that it is present in Guinea since 2001.

8. Interview, September 2020(a), Conakry, Guinea.

9. Interview, September 2020(b), Conakry, Guinea.

10. Interview, July 2020, Dakar, Senegal.

11. Author translation: ‘We come to your institution to ask for your support in the development of a migration policy document’.

12. https://www.iom.int/acp-eu-dialogue-migration-and-development

13. Interview, 03 March 2020 (a) Abuja, Nigeria.

14. Interview, 21 August 2020, Dakar, Senegal.

15. Interview, 29 July 2020(L), Dakar, Senegal.

16. Interview, 02 March 2020, Abuja Nigeria.

17. Interview, 23 July 2020(L), Paris, France.

18. Interview, 13 July 2020(L), Paris, France.

19. Interview with government official, September 2020(a), Banjul, The Gambia.

20. Interview 02 March 2020 Abuja, Nigeria.

21. Interview, 21 August 2020, Dakar, Senegal.