The Geopolitics in the Global Compacts: Sovereignty, Emerging Norms, and Hypocrisy in Global Migration Governance

ABSTRACT

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCM) were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2018. After nearly five years, it is time for a critical reflection on the geopolitical interests that motivated the negotiations, agreements, and implementation. The purpose of this special issue was to critically examine how states used the Global Compacts to achieve their strategic interests using migration diplomacy. Each article attempts to question and problematise the assumptions, logics, and rhetoric put forward in the Global Compacts and resulting implementation by states and international organisations. The special issue also highlights the emerging norm of state responsibility for well-managed migration within the Global Compacts, and the notable silences around non-refoulement, internal displacement, and climate migration. The authors in this special issue worked to understand the gaps, hypocrisy, and contradictions in the implementation, now five years after the adoption of the Global Compacts. This introduction article lays out the driving questions for the special issue, along with our main themes, concepts, and contributions.

In 2018, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCM). Both compacts were the result of two years of consultations and negotiations, following the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. Taken together, these three ambitious international agreements raised migration and displacement to the highest level of international dialogue and cooperation by setting the agenda for years of debate, data gathering, and forums, and by establishing new institutions, capacity building mechanisms, and funds. But five years later, what have the Global Compacts achieved?

This special issue examines the geopolitics of the Global Compacts on migrants and refugees by critically examining the emerging norms and omissions in the compacts, the power relations and capacity building initiatives, and the gaps between state rhetoric, state commitments, and implementation since 2018. It is necessary to critically review the impact of the Global Compacts, as much of the recent discourse around the agreements emerged from the policy sector, which is actively invested in the implementation of the compacts. These positivists reviews, briefings, and progress reports are part of the political processes that the compacts called into existence, rather than critical scholarship that questions the assumptions, interests, and geopolitics of the Global Compacts. There has been excellent research on the negotiations, content, and promise of the compacts (Ferris and Donato 2020), including the 2019 special issues in International Journal of Refugee Law (McAdam 2019) and International Migration (Ferris and Martin 2019). And now, after five years, it is time for further reflection on how the two landmark agreements shape state practice and international cooperation on migrants and refugees.

Before their adoption, hopes were high that the Global Compacts would be ‘norm-creating’ instruments, that further encouraged the emergence of new rules and principles related to the protection of refugees and migrants, while also serving ‘a norm-filling role’ to address the gaps in legally binding instruments (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2019, 607). Some scholars feared that the real impact of the Global Compacts would be the weakening of international treaties (Cholewinski 2019) or an uneven implementation by states (Pécoud 2021, 30). This special issue addresses these concerns since the adoption of the compacts and examines ongoing challenges such as capacity building, the externalisation of international protection, immigration detention, euphemistic rhetoric and dysphemistic practices in migration management, and the lack of international protections for climate migrants. Reflecting on the actions undertaken since the compacts were first adopted, we question the fundamental assumptions and problematise the contributions of the Global Compacts to global migration governance.

The contributors to this special issue address several key questions in their articles:

• In what ways have geopolitical interests, regional relationships, and other alliances impacted the implementation of the Global Compacts?

• How have the Global Compacts shaped state rhetoric and international norms about international migration and forced displacement?

• How have states and international organisations navigated the implementation of the Global Compacts in relation to state sovereignty?

• In what way have contradictions within the Global Compacts impacted their implementation through state practices?

Briefly, the authors approach these questions by problematising the assumptions, logics, and rhetoric that underpin the Global Compacts, in addition to situating them within the geopolitics of certain moments and regional contexts. Micinski and Bourbeau examine how the meaning of capacity building changed in migration management over the last 70 years, tracing the norm of a ‘well-managed migration’ in the Global Compacts to show how the GCR and GCM increase the capacity of international organisations to intervene in domestic institutions, rather than increase the capacity of national institutions. Through the similar lens of capacity building, Robinson examines migrant smuggling in the Global Compacts, arguing that offshoring and outsourcing of Canada’s anti-smuggling policy weakens state commitments, endangers refugees, and reinforces the uneven distribution of refugees between the Global North and South. Lefebvre and Cocan highlight a similar gap between states commitments and practices, arguing that Canada and France use the Global Compacts as a foreign policy tool to push migrant-sending states to reform migrant detention but have done little to change their own detention practices. Relatedly, Campos-Delgado shows how ambivalent and contradictory rhetoric served a political purpose in Mexico because the government could both champion migrant rights during the negotiation and implementation of the compacts and yet continue to use bureaucratic negligence, precarious infrastructure, spatial fixation to restrict migration and punish migrants. Finally, Woodworth explains the remarkable omission or lack of protection for climate displacement within the refugee compact, showing how right-wing populist rhetoric and security discourses influenced the negotiations, as well as the complicated relationship between climate change, displacement, and geopolitics.

Overall, the authors identify throughout the special issue the geopolitical and strategic foreign policy goals that are pursued through the Global Compacts. In this introductory article, we outline the contributions of the authors, their key concepts and findings, and the glaring gap between states’ commitments in the Global Compacts and the same states’ policies and practices with vulnerable migrants and refugees.

The Geopolitics of the Global Compacts

The first contribution of the authors in this special issue is to explore how states pursued their geopolitical interests through the Global Compacts. In many ways, the Global Compacts became the peak institutions for migration diplomacy where ‘states’ use of diplomatic tools, processes, and procedures to manage cross-border population mobility’ (Adamson and Tsourapas 2019). States pursued their different interests in the consultations, thematic events, formal negotiations, and intergovernmental conferences that led to the agreements. The compacts also established an architecture of global migration governance – for example, the Global Forum on Refugees and the International Migration Review Forum – through which states will come together at the global level to reflect on their progress and pledge new commitments every four years (Micinski 2021, 113). The Global Compacts and the varieties of ways they are being implemented are quintessential spaces for migration diplomacy where states make deals and negotiate over how to address migration and displacement.

In this issue, Micinski and Bourbeau detail how the Global Compacts created new capacity building institutions, like the UNHCR Asylum Capacity Support Group and UN Network on Migration’s capacity building mechanism. While these new institutions have begun to provide training and support, the authors show how ‘capacity building attempts to depoliticise essentially political interventions that determine resources and policy outcomes’ (Micinski and Bourbeau 2023). The geopolitical interests of states in the Global North influence how capacity is built and what policy areas receive funding and support. For example, Robinson shows how Canada promoted and funded capacity building in Southeast Asia and West Africa on anti-smuggling. Canada linked their capacity building initiatives to the GCM, framing the work as technical and politically neutral; however, Robinson (2023) shows that ‘anti-smuggling policy does not simply provide technical “solutions” to the self-evident “problem” of migrant smuggling’. An apolitical framing of capacity building hides the state-centric logic of anti-smuggling and ignores the explicit state violence towards migrants. The GCM’s emphasis on capacity building reflects the anxiety from the Global North about ‘incapable states’ in the Global South who cannot or will not restrict irregular migration (Edmunds and Juncos 2020; Robinson 2023). The migration compact presents capacity building, presumably always building state-centric capacity, as a global consensus but Robinson (2023) points out that is more reflective of the ‘geopolitical consensus of exclusionary policies across the Global North’.

Ultimately, Robinson asks the deeper, more critical question about capacity building initiatives: ‘Who is being empowered?’ Robinson’s research points to authoritarian states who are geopolitical allies of Canada and who are willing implementors of the outsourcing of refoulement and other forms of repression against migrants. Micinski and Bourbeau’s answer to this question is that capacity building initiatives paradoxically increase the staff, resources, and avenues for international organisations to intervene, rather than increasing the capacity of states themselves. These articles call into question the straight forward nature of capacity building and show how these interventions are anything but politically neutral.

The Global Compacts also became a tool for inter-regional rivalry and jockeying for regional leadership. Campos-Delgado (2023) shows that when the United States pulled out of the negotiations for the GCM, Mexico seized the opportunity to become a champion of migrant rights (despite its abysmal track record). Mexico played an active role in shaping the migration compact: Juan José Gómez Camacho, the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the UN, served as a co-facilitator of the GCM negotiations and hosted a preparatory meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in December 2017. Further contrasting Mexican leadership with US abdication, Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary stated: ‘Mexico does not believe in walls, it believes in bridges, and we do not believe that any country, no matter how big and powerful it may be, can face the migratory phenomenon on its own. We therefore regret the position of the United States to withdraw from this collective effort, an effort to improve the lives of millions of people around the world’. However, Campos-Delgado (2023) explains how this rhetoric obscures Mexico’s geopolitical moral dilemma: ‘while at an international level [Mexico] claims to be an eager protector of migrants’ human rights, at a regional level it has openly agreed to curb transit migration and acts as a border-zone’.

Lefebvre and Cocan (2023) highlight a similar geopolitical dilemma in which states in the Global North used the Global Compacts as foreign policy tools for restricting migration from the Global South. While Canada became a champion country of the GCM and France played an active role in negotiations – emphasising the dignity and rights of migrants – both simultaneously sought ways to shift responsibility for migration to sending states. This geopolitical moral dilemma emerges when states’ interests conflict between protecting migrant rights and restricting migration. Lefebvre and Cocan argue that ‘Canada and France’s wider geopolitical goal was to use the GCM to influence the behaviour of migrant sending states, not to improve their own domestic detention regimes’. These geopolitical interests make the compacts useful foreign policy tools, particularly as soft law, which is not legally binding. Elsewhere, Micinski (2021, 71–72) documented how many migrant-receiving states took a restrictionist stance in GCM negotiations and viewed the Global Compacts as a space for more international cooperation on restricting migration. Ironically, the two landmark agreements on migrants and refugees could lead to more state cooperation on preventing and restricting migration, instead of more respect for migrant and refugee rights.

Emerging Norms in the Global Compacts

The authors in this special issue also examine the geopolitics of emerging norms embedded in the Global Compacts. The negotiations, endorsement, and implementation of the migration compact was part of a longer process of constructing migrants as something responsible states must manage in a certain way. For example, the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals put forward a new framing that all states should ‘facilitate orderly, safe, and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’.¹ Soon, ‘orderly, safe, and responsible’ became the mantra throughout the UN system, appearing in press statements, development handbooks, and governance frameworks. The 2016 New York Declaration (para. 24) continued the drum beat, asserting that ‘states have rights and responsibilities to manage and control their borders’. By 2018, this framing of responsibility was rephrased slightly in the official name of the migration compact: the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Micinski and Bourbeau (2023) explain that ‘[t]he emerging norm of “well-managed migration” asserts that if a state is not able to make migration safe, then the international community has a responsibility to provide resources and training to those national institutions’. The Global Compacts affirmed and refined these new framings of how responsible states manage migration.

But well-managed migration—particularly the kind of restrictionist policies affirmed and promoted in the Global Compacts – serves the geopolitical interests of the Global North. In theory, well-managed migration could benefit both migrant-sending and migrant-receiving states, but as the GCM implementation proceeds, it has delivered primarily on restricting and preventing irregular migration, while offering few legal pathways for migration. For example, Robinson points out that Canadian efforts at promoting well-managed migration through anti-smuggling policies were geopolitically motivated because Canada sought to restrict access to asylum, despite knowing the violence and repression migrants would face because of Canada’s outsourcing of responsibility. In Mexico, Campos-Delgado (2023) shows how the government promoted the norm of well-managed migration using the euphemistic rhetoric of ‘dignified, orderly, expeditious, and safe’ migration, but in practice continued dysphemistic practices of bureaucratic negligence, appalling detention conditions, and waiting. As such, the Global Compacts serve Mexico’s geopolitical interests because it can rhetorically nod towards its human rights commitments, while continuing to enforce practices that make life difficult for migrants as a deterrent.

Another geopolitical aspect of the compacts remains: why are there two compacts instead of one? The straight forward answer promoted by government officials during the negotiations was that refugees and migrants are governed by different international legal regimes and so need bespoke agreements. However, the two compacts offered the opportunity for forum shopping (i.e. when states strategically select international forums where they are more likely to achieve their policy preferences (Betts 2010, 2013; Busch 2007)), and had different negotiating processes, scope, and procedures, which made it advantageous to include some policy areas in one and not the other. For example, some states were insistent on excluding any reference to internally displaced persons from the refugee compact and others demanded the removal of non-refoulement from the migration compact (Micinski 2021, 89, 116). The Chinese government representative said: ‘Since migrants and refugees fall under different legal categories, the non-refoulement principle should not be applied to migration issues’.² This meant that non-refoulement was barely referenced in the GCR, and was importantly circumscribed in the GCM.

Similarly, Woodworth (2023) explains why climate migration was excluded from the refugee compact but included in the migration compact. She argues that climate migration was not included in the refugee compact, in part because the GCR was a technical document aimed at consolidating existing refugee law; instead states pushed for climate-induced migration to be included in the migration compact because of its broader scope and because it was clearly soft law. Woodworth finds that the states struggled to incorporate climate migration into the compacts because of three interlocking reasons: the rise of populist nationalism, the securitisation of migration, and the complexity of the causal relationship between climate change and migration. For example, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, France, Austria, and Germany all faced far-right backlash to in migration compact – forcing some to pull back from their geopolitical goals in the GCM. Anticipating this backlash, many states made clear from the beginning that the compacts would have to be non-binding so that the agreements were not required to be ratified or incorporated domestically. Soft law became the tool of choice for migration diplomacy.

Absolute State Sovereignty

Collectively, this special issue attempts to interrogate the geopolitics of the Global Compacts. For states in the Global North, the compacts legitimised migration management as the responsibility of states. This was based on an absolutist interpretation of state sovereignty – what Micinski and Bourbeau (2023) define as ‘the absolute prohibition of interference by other states or external actors in domestic policy’. While traditional accounts of geopolitics and international system assume a similar understanding of sovereignty (i.e. self-interested states rely on mutual non-interference to survive), more recent scholarship has pushed back on the myth of Westphalian sovereignty (Bull 1977; Finnemore 2004; Macmillan 2013; Mearsheimer 2001; Osiander 2001; Waltz 1979). Krasner (1999) reminds us that in practice sovereignty is more like ‘organized hypocrisy’ with varieties of interpretations and contradictory practices in different regions and eras. Importantly, Henderson (2013) and Quinton-Brown (2020) show that sovereignty is part of racist and white supremacist hierarchies that understand white European sovereignty to be absolute and inviolable, while brown and black states in the Global South are easily colonised, occupied, and placed under trusteeship.

Both migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries affirmed states’ absolute sovereignty over migration in the Global Compacts. Migration management and border control are conceived as a core responsibility of states that cannot be interfered by international actors. For example, at the intergovernmental conference adopting the GCM, Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary stated: ‘Undoubtedly, any country, as is the case of Mexico and the United States, in the full exercise of its sovereignty, has the right to define its migration policies. The United States is no exception. We respect that right absolutely’ (Campos-Delgado 2023). States have used the negotiation and implementation of the compacts to reassert their interpretation of absolute sovereignty again and again, which is in service of their geopolitical interests. Micinski and Bourbeau argue that this is because the norm of well-managed migration is consent-based: if states fail to manage migration, the international community can intervene but only by invitation of the host state so as to respect their absolute sovereignty. Of course, interventions are typically with humanitarian aid, capacity building, or funding – not military invasions.

This special issue is ripe with examples of states’ anxiety over migration and displacement leading to the reassertion of absolute sovereignty, which invariably leads to violence towards migrants during anti-smuggling in South Asia and West Africa, deteriorating conditions in detention in France and Canada, and bureaucratic negligence in Mexico along with other dysphemistic practices that make life ‘unpleasant for the migrant’. In addition, Woodworth (2023) identifies how the geopolitics around climate migration and anxiety about state sovereignty are part of a wider trend in securitisation rooted in the reassertion of absolute sovereignty.

Finally, states rebuffed any suggestions for the Global Compact to be hard law that would be legally binding. Instead, they chose the legally ambiguous term – compact—as a way to raise the profile of the agreement but remain non-binding soft law (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2019). This clever political strategy allowed states to avoid implementing the obligations of the compacts through their domestic legislatures, which were increasingly hostile to migrants and refugees. But the use of soft law, as Lefebvre and Cocan point out, was also geopolitically astute as it allowed states in the Global North to use the compacts to name and shame migrant-sending countries, while never intending to implement the same policies within their own countries. This blatant hypocrisy was not unique – rather hypocrisy and contradictions run throughout the Global Compacts and their implementation.

Hypocrisy and Contradictions

Each article in this special issue also examines the hypocrisy and contradictions that have emerged since the adoption of the Global Compacts. It is not unusual to note when there is a gap between state commitments and state practices in migration policies but this collection of authors has shown how that gap is geopolitically strategic. For example, Lefebvre and Cocan illustrate this hypocrisy by the choice of words used by Canadian and French governments. By disguising their practices with different vocabulary – that migrants are being ‘housed’ and not ‘detained’, for example – states circumvent their commitments by simply defining migration management practices differently. As such, these practices contribute to the disregard of pre-existing obligations in international human rights law. Geopolitically, the compacts have enabled states to shield their restrictive national practices, while still presenting themselves as champions of human rights on the international stage. Campos-Delgado further develops on this point, quoting Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary: ‘Mexico does not believe in the criminalisation of migrants, Mexico does not believe in walls, it believes in bridges’ (Campos-Delgado 2023). Yet, shortly after the speech, Mexico agreed to increase enforcement towards migrants. Discursive strategies are thus ‘strategies of aggravation that aim to highlight the more pejorative features in an offensive way’ (Campos-Delgado 2023). Even if the compacts aim to protect already established human rights, these instruments were subordinated to states’ political decisions. There is a real disjuncture between rhetoric and practice in which states prioritise their national interests over migrants’ human rights. Not only is this hypocritical, but it also encourages the abrogation of binding obligations under international law.

Other authors in this special issue reveal how the contradictions within the compacts also serve a geopolitical purpose. For example, the compacts have contradictions like encouraging capacity building to protect migrants and capacity building to prevent migrants from ever reaching that protection. Similarly, the compacts fully endorse absolute sovereignty and yet meddle in reforming states’ migration policies in line with international standards. Robinson shows that, for the Canadian government, ‘capacity building [is] framed as a technical effort to provide practical solutions and assist affected parties, enhance border control and protect migrants’ when in fact, it ‘offers a means of bolstering the state’s capacity to monitor and intercept migration flows at a distance’ (Robinson 2023). Capacity building serves a geopolitical function in the sense that it ‘helps’ states meet their obligations, while shifting responsibility for protection further and further away. Micinski and Bourbeau suggest that the compacts both affirm and undermine absolute sovereignty: capacity building becomes a work around for sovereignty – while not the same level of physical coercion as military interventions – it serves ‘similar goals of influencing domestic policies and transforming state structures to fit with the current international order’.

Finally, as Woodworth writes, this hypocrisy is illustrated by the absence or lack of engagement with certain issues, namely climate migration. Indeed, by excluding climate displacement from the refugee compact, and limiting international protections, states can restrict movement and limit the number of climate migrants entering their country without violating their obligations under international law. This voluntary disengagement within the refugee compact illustrates a lack of political will to adopt a new legally binding mechanism that protects people who are displaced by climate change. Ultimately, the silences within the Global Compacts say as much as the commitments.

Conclusion

The purpose of this special issue was to critically examine how states used the Global Compacts to achieve their geopolitical interests using migration diplomacy. Each article attempts to question and problematise the assumptions, logics, and rhetoric put forward in the Global Compacts and resulting implementation by states and international organisations. The special issue also highlights the emerging norm of state responsibility for well-managed migration within the Global Compacts, and the notable silences around non-refoulement, internal displacement, and climate migration. The authors in this special issue worked to understand the gaps, hypocrisy and contradictions in the implementation, now five years after the adoption of the Global Compacts.

The Global Compacts on refugees and for migration were significant achievements simply by putting migration and displacement at the top of the international agenda and for reaching notable agreement amongst the majority of states. It is also remarkable that sending, transit, and receiving states all agreed that migration policy is a core part of absolute sovereignty. No matter the outcomes for vulnerable migrants – those who do not fit into legal categories or who fall through the gaps of aid and protection – states in the Global South and North agreed that it was in their geopolitical interests to regulate and control migration. To state the obvious: governments agree that they are the absolute arbiters of who is allowed to move. The compacts subvert the very human urge or need to move to the absolute control of state authorities. Despite the rhetorical nods to the whole-of-society and human rights institutions, the geopolitics of migration management are state-centric, and the Global Compacts affirm the state’s responsibility for migration. It should be no surprise that shortly after signing the compacts, states around the world – but particularly in Europe – began to crackdown on NGO rescue boats and restricting the space for civil society to support migrants and refugees (Ben-Arieh and Heins 2021; Carrera et al. 2019; McDowell 2022; Micinski 2019).

This special issue, along with other scholarship on the Global Compacts, are important, particularly in the run-up to the Global Refugee Forum in December 2023 and the International Migration Review Forum in 2026. While these forums are designed to socialise states and other actors into the specific modes of global migration governance, they also offer opportunities for engagement, critical reflections, and disruption. Our hope is that a clear-sighted understanding of the geopolitics of global migration governance better reflects the world as it is. This is not a vision of migration policy without politics, as many of the authors point out, that is impossible; rather it views the Global Compacts as foreign policy tools that pursue strategic goals. States and non-state actors should understand them as such, rather than ideal-type treaties or humanitarian to-do lists. A critical understanding of the Global Compacts offers space, opportunity structures, and new political alliances for those actors wishing to resist, subvert, or revolutionise how migration is governed.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. SDG target 10.7.

2. China, ‘Statement of Ambassador Li Li, Leader of the Chinese Delegation and Chinese Ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco’, Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact For Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, Marrakesh, 11 December 2018, https://www.un.org/en/conf/migration/assets/pdf/GCM-Sta tements/china.pdf.