Abstract
The chapter focuses on the role of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in putting forward a humanitarian rationality to the governance of West African borders in response to the 2014–2016 Ebola virus epidemic. It reconstructs how the IOM as a central global actor in border security governance has sought to promote and apply its concept of ‘Humanitarian Border Management’ (HBM) to assist governments and border authorities with a more effective management of their borders. Through the analytical framework of ‘nodal governance’, the chapter analyses how the IOM aligns with and reproduces a political rationality of the ‘humanitarian border’ in its Ebola crisis response initiatives in West Africa. The chapter argues that the implementation of HBM carries significant ramifications for the reinforced linkage between humanitarian and security rationalities of governance in the regulation of West African mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘humanitarian border’, according to William Walters, is an ‘emergent zone of politics in its own right’ (2010, 157). Critically engaging the concept of the ‘humanitarian border’ might be misinterpreted as implying a spatially distinct border as its analytical focus (see Squire 2015, 29). Instead, I concentrate my analysis on the political rationality (of government) through which the border is reasoned and problematised as predominantly requiring ‘humanitarian’ intervention. I thus term such rationality of government as the ‘humanitarian border’, echoing Walters’ conceptualisation.
- 2.
While the nodal governance framework may lend itself to political ethnography, it also caters to interpretative policy analysis approaches which privilege policy documents and elite/expert interviews in order to reveal how international policy professionals ‘make sense’ of policies in dominant ‘problem representations’ (the ‘imaginings’ of a well-managed border). See Bacchi (2009) and Yanow (2015).
- 3.
According to Feldman (2012), political rationalities of governance determine to a considerable extent the ‘rhetorical tropes’ that nodal actors deploy in order to represent or interpret a certain situation on the ground, thereby helping to standardise a certain perspective on problem identification and policy conceptualisation (16–17).
- 4.
My understanding of political rationales of governance borrows from Feldman’s description of what he terms ‘rationales of governance’: they are calculative and ‘technically convenient’—something that policy professionals in a node can strategically, pragmatically and routinely exploit, deploy or enforce as ‘an obvious solution to an obvious problem without need of central command’—to satisfy particular policy needs (2012, 16). Political rationalities can be practically understood in an ‘instrumental and relative’ (Rabinow 2003, 38) manner as generating capacity for ‘a reasoned choice—a practical wisdom—that allowed an individual to act on the basis of the requirements of virtue in each fresh context’ (Lakoff and Collier 2004, 423).
- 5.
Following Barnett and Finnemore’s (2004) argument of ‘productive power’, policy professionals thereby productively help in ‘constituting that world that needs to be regulated’ by creating ‘categories of action’ or introducing tailor-made remedies to particular problems (179; see Bradley 2017, 104). Through their ‘constitutive work’, they populate and consolidate a certain rationality of governance with their own mentalities, technologies, resources and institutional arrangements.
- 6.
The IOM (2015b, 1) proposes support to its member states with the conduct of assessments on HBM capacities, delivery of HBM training to border officials, drafting of Standard Operating Procedures and contingency plans for emergencies, the creation of interagency mechanisms, as well as the design and procurement of mobile communication and registration technology ‘solutions’—to name but a few of the possible activities listed under its Humanitarian Border Management portfolio.
- 7.
I concur with Frowd’s (2018, 1660–1662) argument that IOM’s border security governance interventions in the Global South have at large taken a turn towards the ‘developmental’ in rhetoric and practice, which largely draw from (and are justified by) a humanitarian rationality that has become central to the IOM’s activities, self-understanding and global positioning.
- 8.
For example, Côte d’Ivoire closed its land borders on 23 August 2014 to take ‘strong preventive measures in order to protect the population, including all foreigners, living on Ivorian territory’ (France 24 2014).
- 9.
Interview, IOM HQ Staff, Abidjan, 9 March 2016.
- 10.
Interview, IOM HQ Staff, Abidjan, 9 March 2016.
- 11.
With technologies, I refer in a narrower fashion to ‘the means of realization of rationalities’ (Aradau and Van Munster 2007, 97), that is, any form of intervention, practice, device or method employed to put a node—and the political rationality it supports—into effect.
- 12.
For example, The IOM’s Health and Humanitarian Border Management (HHBM) team has monitored the health screening of passengers travelling through Lungi International Airport in Freetown, Sierra Leone (IOM 2015g, 1–3).
- 13.
Interview, IOM HQ Staff, Geneva, 3 December 2015.
- 14.
- 15.
Interview, IOM Côte d’Ivoire Mission Staff, Abidjan, 9 March 2016.
- 16.
Interview, IOM Côte d’Ivoire Mission Staff, Abidjan, 9 March 2016.
- 17.
Most significantly, the IOM recruited national and international health professionals to manage and work in Ebola Treatment Units to provide primary healthcare services (IOM 2016b, 9). Some of these professionals were placed in cross-border areas.
- 18.
For example, the country’s sub-office in Danané, a town close to both the Liberian and the Guinean border, became the principal hub for the implementation of most Ebola-related projects.
- 19.
Informal conversation, IOM Côte d’Ivoire Field Mission Staff, Odienné, 17 February 2015.
- 20.
This observation dovetails well with Geiger’s claims (2013, 33–34) about current trends in ‘disciplining’ as a new form of governmentality that ‘challenges traditional assumptions of repressive state control’ in the field of migration.
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Scherf, T. (2020). The IOM’s Humanitarian Border Management in the West African Ebola Crisis (2014–2016). In: Geiger, M., Pécoud, A. (eds) The International Organization for Migration. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1_10
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