Fiona B. Adamson, Professor, SOAS, University of London, and Kelly M. Greenhill, Professor, Tufts University
In the current political environment, states and their proxies go to great lengths to repel would-be asylum seekers and other migrants, increasingly using an array of tools of statecraft to prevent people from reaching their territories. These include externalizing migration processes in ways that feature transactional ‘deals’ and ‘partnerships’, which include a significant transfer of resources from one state or organization to another in exchange for an agreement to host, assist with and/or accept the return of people who have been deemed ‘illegal’ or ‘unwanted’. In this piece, we explore the geopolitics of deal-making in the realm of forced migration management and its relationship to migration externalization. We define the phenomenon—which we term transactional forced migration (TFM)—and situate it within the growing literature on migration diplomacy, externalization and what is known as the instrumentalization and/or weaponization of migration. We then highlight illustrative examples and their implications for the states and non-state actors negotiating these deals and for the migrants subject to their effects. We additionally identify and explain several of the under-appreciated connections between TFM schemes and other dimensions of diplomacy and international politics.
Introduction
In the current political environment, states and their proxies are going to great lengths to repel would-be asylum seekers and other migrants, increasingly using an array of tools of statecraft to prevent people from reaching their territories.[1] Among these tools – and included as key aspects in many migration ‘deals’ and ‘partnerships’ – are several elements that can only be described as organized and state-sanctioned forms of forced migration. Often these migration ‘deals’ and ‘partnerships’ include a significant transfer of resources from one state or organization to another in exchange for an agreement to host, assist with and/or accept the return of people who have been deemed ‘illegal’ or ‘unwanted’. They may feature conditional foreign aid packages and economic assistance, along with programs that externalize migration control, strengthen borders around the globe and incorporate migration management into regional security assistance regimes.[2] Sometimes these arrangements are formalized in treaties, agreements, and memoranda of understanding, among other legal instruments, but often they are not.[3]
These mechanisms and the deals that undergird them are frequently characterized by transactional components that fly in the face of humanitarian commitments, such as states’ obligations under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol–legal instruments that serve as the backbone of the international refugee regime and provide human rights protections within signatory states for those fleeing violence and persecution. In some instances, these transactional arrangements can be viewed as deleterious forms of ‘migration diplomacy’ that have arisen in response to thorny policy dilemmas that states face around migration management.[4] In others, they comprise the ‘weaponization’ of populations by states and non-state actors who employ (the threat of) migration as a thoroughly transactional bargaining chip to pursue a wide range of political, economic and strategic objectives.[5] Sometimes these deals are just about migration management, but often they are tied to and intertwined with a far broader array of political, economic and/or military interests. Such interests have run the gamut from the provision of financial, technical and military aid through to diplomatic support and restraint or even military intervention.
Externalization and Transactional Forced Migration (TFM)
Externalization processes often involve dual political dynamics of migration diplomacy and migration weaponization, and can be viewed as a type of transactional forced migration – a term which captures and lays bare how migration management is frequently subjected to the ‘art of the deal’ – quite often both to the pronounced detriment to the displaced and to the demonstrable benefit of states and myriad other parties who stand to profit from such arrangements. Transactional forced migration (TFM) refers to the instigation, negotiation and conclusion of formal and informal political deals intended to facilitate and/or forestall engineered cross-border population movements. TFM includes population transfers, exchanges, repatriations, readmission agreements, deportation arrangements, and other deals designed to involuntarily move people across borders.
The extent and frequency with which contemporary policies designed to repel unwanted migration contain elements of organized and transactional forced migration is notable.[6] For example, as part of its response to the 2015-16 European migration ‘crisis’, the EU placed renewed emphasis on the ‘removal’ and ‘return’ of irregular migrants and ‘failed’ asylum-seekers.[7] The September 2015 EU Action Plan on Return reinforced and strengthened an already existing system of formal EU readmission agreements (EURAs), non-standard agreements, and individual state readmission agreements with a range of non-EU countries.[8] In addition, the EU introduced a ‘temporary emergency relocation scheme’ which was, in effect, a system of mandatory population transfers of up to 160,000 asylum seekers and refugees across EU member states.[9]
The EU has also negotiated external deals, including the much-publicized March 2016 EU-Turkey deal, which included, along with other measures, provisions for forced returns from Greece to Turkey in exchange for six billion euros in aid and an array of other concessions.[10] The arrangement was heavily criticized by human rights groups, as were arrangements such as the 2016 EU-Afghanistan ‘Joint Way Forward Declaration’ and 2021 ‘Joint Declaration on Migration Cooperation’ (JDMC) which provided for the return of refused asylum seekers and irregular migrants in exchange for substantial aid packages for Afghanistan.[11] Although labeled as ‘return’, many Afghans in Europe are second and third generation born in Pakistan or Iran who have never set foot in Afghanistan. Thus, these negotiated ‘return’ arrangements are more akin to involuntary and forced population transfers.[12] A similar blurring of the lines between voluntary ‘return’ and organized population transfer can be seen in Turkish proposals for the resettlement of Syrian refugees in northern Syria. Ostensibly voluntary and for humanitarian purposes, these programs are strongly motivated by Turkey’s security concerns and its interest in creating a buffer zone in Northern Syria in its ongoing conflict with armed Kurdish groups.[13]
These migration deals and externalization processes have been facilitated by various forms of TFM in which bargains are struck – often in the context of asymmetric power relations – and states and non-state actors use the tools at their disposal to achieve their migration aims, or use migration to achieve other diplomatic aims.[14] Wealthy states seeking to achieve migration control aims use a combination of diplomacy, substantial levels of funding, the provision of infrastructure and training, the sharing of intelligence and an array of other concessions, often tailored to the particular actors who are party to these deals. Migration source or transit states are often similarly transactional in their leveraging of migration issues to obtain various foreign policy goals and commitments, such as development aid, security assistance and training packages, intelligence cooperation, and concessions such as visa liberalization policies.[15]
Transactional forced migration deals must be mutually beneficial at some level, to some extent, and to some parties, even if they are often struck under broader conditions of structural inequality and/or coercion.[16] In extreme cases, states can become heavily reliant on the income generated by warehousing transferred populations and accepting returns and be forced to divert resources from the purposes for which they were intended to cover other shortfalls.[17] The tiny island of Nauru, for instance, has largely become dependent on ‘managing humans for profit.’[18]
Similarly, the structure of TFM deals may crowd out critical domestic spending in favor of migration regulation-focused expenditures favored by wealthier partners. For instance, some TFM deals carry the implication that failing ‘to cooperate in strengthening protection capacity… and thereby reducing onward movements might in turn result in consequences in other areas – such as the reduction of humanitarian assistance channeled through UNHCR or the reduction of development assistance.’[19]
At the same time, however, more traditionally powerful partners in these arrangements can themselves become asymmetrically vulnerable to changing or escalating demands of–and domestic political shifts within–their ‘junior’ partners, who can threaten to stop cooperating and demand renegotiation of existing deals. For instance, after successfully negotiating the lifting of the remaining sanctions on his country in exchange for helping to stanch population movements across the Mediterranean in 2004, Libya leader Muammar Gaddafi serially threatened to cease cooperation with the EU at least four times between 2006 and 2010–and extracted concessions each time–before fatally overplaying his hand in 2011.[20] Similarly, Pakistan and Kenya both threatened to expel Afghan and Somali refugees, respectively, in bids to extract higher levels of foreign aid from the US, UK, Japan and EU – ultimately succeeding in securing $300 million in combined additional aid.[21]
The transactional nature of these arrangements extends beyond states to specialized agencies of states and supranational entities–such as the EU’s Frontex; to international organizations funded and guided by states–such as the IOM and the UNHCR; to private companies, who benefit from the contracts for the technology and outsourcing of various aspects of the ‘return’ cycle, including the provision of detention, transportation, security and resettlement services; to local NGOs that receive external funding to facilitate the integration of ‘returnees,’ and even to smugglers, who are sometimes critical handmaidens in these transactional arrangements, especially but not exclusively those in which coercion is involved.[22]
The internationalization of state activities through employment of international proxy management agents is neither new nor limited to migration. But such uses carry significant contemporary consequences, including diluting individual states’ responsibilities both for policy formulation and implementation, thereby providing states shields against accountability as well as some degree of plausible deniability over unethical and illegal activities undertaken by these supranational and international organizations. Internationalization may also result in fundamentally illiberal outcomes, despite being portrayed as ways to safeguard liberal values.[23] Externally-funded repatriation programs in third countries are, for instance, increasingly being used as a means for signatory states to bypass the prohibition against the refoulement of refugees under the 1951 Convention. Third party states programs can rely on forms of de facto coerced return in cases where states have not signed the Convention by contracting out ‘voluntary repatriation’ programs whose voluntariness is often in question.
In the absence of an international migration regime, international organizations like the IOM have become key actors in ‘the definition, implementation and assessment of migration policies and partnerships.’ The organization has ‘come to function as a “service-provider” in almost every aspect of migration governance,’ including TFM deals. As a result, ‘its funding, geographical reach and technical expertise have grown exponentially,’ as has its power and autonomy.[24] With funding from the EU Trust Fund, in early 2018, the IOM organized the return from Libya – a non-signatory to the Convention – of more than 23,000 refugees and migrants to 26 different countries.[25] The IOM has additionally facilitated, with EU funding, the removal of thousands of migrants from Algeria to Niger in the context of ongoing waves of government-led expulsions.[26]
Organized hypocrisy, knock-on effects and blowback
The contemporary proliferation of migration ‘deals’ points to the ubiquitousness of TFM as both a tool of migration diplomacy and a means of instrumentalizing migration for other foreign policy ends. These migration deals usually contain elements of what can only be described as state-organized forced migration and involuntary population transfer. In such deals, states engage in transactional interactions in which ‘undesirables’, broadly defined, are viewed as problems to be solved, sources of conflict and instability, and burdens to be offloaded and transferred to third parties in ways that legitimize and institutionalize their removal and deportation.
Today’s transactional forced migration arrangements are often disguised through the use of humanitarian rhetoric, The language of ‘protection’, ‘partnerships’, ‘reciprocity’, ‘opportunities’, and ‘preservation of life’ can elide and obscure the detrimental effects of such deals on the individuals subject to them. This is often no accident. The EU in its official guidance and documentation uses the term ‘removal,’ rather than deportation or repatriation, because deportation is seen as having a ‘negative connotation.’[27] ‘Systems of organized hypocrisy,’ such as those embodied in many TFM deals, emphasize containment over the promotion of asylum and other human rights standards.[28]
Of course, the management of international mobility is widely agreed to be ‘underpinned by the play of state preferences rather than the principles of the international liberal order.’[29] As in other areas of international politics, there is a gap between ideals of global responsibility and strategic concerns for national interest.[30] Yet, the extent to which states are willing to openly pursue migration deals at the expense of humanitarian concerns and in breach of obligations under the Refugee Convention is nonetheless noteworthy, as is the degree to which these TFM deals are intimately related to other dimensions of domestic and international politics, transcending the boundaries between security, economic and social policy.
Conclusions
As migration deals increasingly center on ‘returns’ and pushbacks, the financial transfers that accompany them often lead to aid dependency and have unforeseen domestic political consequences. For example, the EU’s ‘return’ regime and accompanying financial transfers have reshaped the domestic economies and politics of countries such as The Gambia, where ‘migration management’ has become a ‘wide source of employment’ and is replacing remittances as a source of income, even spawning local NGOs that have sprung up as local facilitators of ‘return’ and reintegration.[31] Organized returns also have the potential to fuel local conflict, as they did in the cases of Bosnia and Burundi.[32] Furthermore, states that are heavily reliant on migration remittances may also have incentives to seek financial compensation for any arrangement that curbs emigration and decreases remittance income, but also to exploit their positions as de facto refugee warehouses for states in the Global North, using threats of non-cooperation or expulsion as a means of extracting greater levels of aid.[33]
Nevertheless, there remains considerable variation in how states leverage their positions as targets of return regimes, externalization and outsourcing, and not all states are willing to enter into such deals or to use migration issues as a form of leverage vis-a-vis more wealthy states – for example, across West Africa, actors have adopted ‘different types of strategies, ranging from anticipation, incorporation, passive acceptance, and outright opportunism, to partial or total resistance.’[34]
Similarly, wealthy states in the global North are not compelled to engage in migration ‘deal-making.’ Expanding visas to open up legal channels for migration, for example, has been shown to decrease irregular migration.[35] And in the context of declining populations and labor shortages in the UK, Europe and elsewhere, migration deals that simultaneously involve the transfer of large sums of money and the forced return of populations eager to settle in a new country might appear to be a losing rather than winning deal. However, contemporary migration management trends appear to be moving in the opposite direction: towards greater use of migration ‘deals’ and TFM arrangements as part of broader policies of externalization. As the politicization and exploitation of public fears about irregular migration continue to mount, an even larger number of states and non-state actors may be incentivized to enter into these bargaining arrangements, with potentially quite deleterious human rights consequences, as well as additional unforeseen domestic and geopolitical consequences.
This is an abridged version of Fiona B. Adamson and Kelly M. Greenhill, “Deal-making, diplomacy and transactional forced migration,” International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 2, March 2023, Pages 707–725. The full article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad017
Footnotes
[1] Ruben Zaiotti, ed., Externalizing migration management: Europe, North America and the spread of “remote control” practices (London: Routledge, 2016); David FitzGerald, Refuge beyond reach: how rich democracies repel asylum seekers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] Nina Wilén, ‘The impact of security force assistance in Niger: meddling with borders’, International Affairs 98: 4, July 2022, pp. 1405-1421, p. 1408.
[3] Jean-Pierre Cassarino, ‘Inventory of the bilateral agreements linked to readmission’, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VKBCBR, Harvard Dataverse, V2, 2022 (Accessed 4 Aug. 2022).
[4] Fiona B. Adamson and Gerasimos Tsourapas, ‘Migration diplomacy in world politics’, International Studies Perspectives 20: 2, 2019, pp. 113-128.
[5] Kelly M. Greenhill, Weapons of mass migration: forced displacement, coercion, and foreign policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, 2010/2016); Kelly M. Greenhill, ‘When migrants become weapons: The long history and worrying future of a coercive tactic’, Foreign Affairs 101: 2, March/April 2022, pp. 155-164.
[6] Matthew J. Gibney, ‘Is deportation a form of forced migration?’ Refugee Survey Quarterly 32: 2, 2013, pp. 116-129.
[7] Manuela da Rosa Jorge, ‘European Union readmission agreements: deportation as a gateway to displacement?’ In Jasmin Lilian Diab, ed., Dignity in movement: borders, bodies and rights E-International relations 16 June 2021: https://www.e-ir.info/publication/dignity-in-movement-borders-bodies-and-rights/ (accessed 8 Aug. 2022).
[8] Sergio Carrera, Implementation of EU readmission agreements: identity determination dilemmas and the blurring of rights (Brussels: Springer International, 2016); Cassarino, ‘Inventory of the bilateral agreements’; Peter Slominski and Florian Trauner, ‘Reforming me softly: how soft law has changed the EU return policy since the migration crisis’, West European Politics 44: 1, 2021, pp. 93-113.
[9] Arne Niemann and Natascha Zaun, ‘EU refugee policies and politics in times of crisis: theoretical and empirical perspectives’, Journal of Common Market Studies 56: 1, 2018, pp. 3-32, p. 6ff. Sandra Lavenex, ‘Failing forward towards which Europe? Organized hypocrisy in the Common European Asylum System’, Journal of Common Market Studies 56: 5, 2018, pp. 1195-1212, p. 1204.
[10] Kelly M. Greenhill, ‘Open arms behind barred doors: fear, hypocrisy and policy schizophrenia in the European migration crisis’, European Law Journal 22: 3, 2016, pp. 279-294; Niemann and Zaun, ‘EU refugee policies’, p. 8ff.
[11] da Rosa Jorge, ‘European Union Readmission Agreements’; Joint Declaration on Migration between the European Union and Afghanistan, 2021’: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/jmcd_-_english_version_signed_26apr2021.pdf (accessed 6 Aug. 2022).
[12] Shahram Khosravi, ed., After deportation: ethnographic perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan 2018), p. 8.
[13] Sinem Adar, ‘Repatriation to Turkey’s “safe zone” in Northeast Syria: Ankara’s goals and European concerns’, SWP Comment 1, January 2020, p. 3.
[14] Greenhill, Weapons of mass migration; Adamson and Tsourapas, ‘Migration diplomacy’.
[15] See, for instance, Hein De Haas, ‘The myth of invasion: the inconvenient realities of African migration to Europe’, Third World Quarterly 29: 7, 2008, pp. 1180-1322; Emanuela Paoletti, ‘Power relations and international migration: the case of Italy and Libya’, Political Studies 59: 2, 2011, pp. 269-289; Gerasimos Tsourapas, ‘The Syrian refugee crisis and foreign policy decision-making in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey’, Journal of Global Security Studies 4: 4, October 2019, pp. 464-481; Fiona B. Adamson and Gerasimos Tsourapas, ‘The migration state in the Global South: nationalizing, developmental and neoliberal models of migration management’, International Migration Review 54: 3, 2020, pp. 853-882; Luisa F. Freier, Nicolas R. Micinski and Gerasimos Tsourapas, ‘Refugee commodification: the diffusion of refugee rent seeking in the Global South’, Third World Quarterly 42: 22, 2021, pp. 2747-2766; Philippe M. Frowd, ‘Producing the ‘transit’ migration state: international security intervention in Niger’. Third World Quarterly 41: 2, 2020, pp. 340-358.
[16] Wendy Vogt, ‘Dirty work, dangerous others: The politics of outsourced immigration enforcement in Mexico,’ Migration and Society: Advances in Research 3: 1, 2020, pp. 50-63. Vogt, p. 51.
[17] Alexander Betts and James Milner, ‘The externalisation of EU asylum policy: the position of African states’. Oxford Working Paper 36 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2006): https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2006/wp-2006-036-betts-milner_eu_asylum_policy_africa/ (accessed 6 Aug. 2022).
[18] Julie Morris, ‘Colonial afterlives of infrastructure: from phosphate to refugee processing in the Republic of Nauru’, Mobilities 16: 5, 2021, pp. 688, 691.
[19] Betts and Milner, The externalisation of EU asylum policy, p. 13.
[20] Kelly M. Greenhill, ‘Migration as a coercive weapon: new evidence from the Middle East’, in Kelly M. Greenhill and Peter Krause, eds., Coercion: The power to hurt in international politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[21] Nicolas R. Micinski, ‘Threats, deportability and aid: the politics of refugee rentier states and regional stability’, Security Dialogue (online first, 2021).
[22] See, e.g., Ruben Andersson, Illegality Inc: clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
[23] Benjamin Miller, ‘How “making the world in its own liberal image” made the West less liberal’, International Affairs 97: 5, September 2021, pp. 1353–1375.
[24] João Terrenas, ‘The International Organization for Migration: the new “UN migration agency” in critical perspective’, International Affairs 97: 3, May 2021, pp. 894–896.
[25] Azadeh Dastyari and Asher Lazarus Hirsch, ‘The ring of steel: extraterritorial migration controls in Indonesia and Libya and the complicity of Australia and Italy,’ Human Rights Law Review 19, 2019, pp. 435-465, p. 456ff.
[26] EU-IOM Joint Initiative for Migrant Protection and Reintegration in Algeria: https://www.migrationjointinitiative.org/countries/north-africa/algeria (accessed 2 Aug 2022).
[27] European Union Glossary. ‘European Commission: asylum and migration glossary 6.0’, 2018: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/networks/european_migration_network/docs/interactive_glossary_6.0_final_version.pdf. p. 320, 329, cited in Jorge, ‘European Union Readmission Agreements’.
[28] Lavenex, ‘Failing forward’, pp. 1205-06.
[29] Jeannette Money, ‘Globalization, international mobility and the international liberal order’, International Affairs 97: 5 September 2021, pp. 1559-1577, p. 1559.
[30] Dong Jin Kim and Andrew Ikhyun Kim, ‘Global Health Diplomacy and North Korea in the Covid-19 Era’, International Affairs 98: 3, May 2022, pp. 915-932, p. 915.
[31] Rosella Marino, Joris Schapendonk and Ine Lietaert, ‘Translating Europe’s return migration regime to The Gambia: The incorporation of local CSOs’, Geopolitics 28: 3, pp. 1033-1056, p. 1044ff.
[32] Kelly M, Greenhill, ‘The politics of repatriation: A snapshot of Bosnia four years after Dayton’, Precis 10: 2, 2000; Stephanie Schwartz, ‘Home again: refugee return and post-conflict violence in Burundi’, International Security 44: 2, 2019, pp. 110-145.
[33] Micinski, ‘Threats, deportability and aid’; Oreva Olakpe, ‘Views on migration partnerships from the ground: lessons from Nigeria’, International Migration 60: 4, August 2022, pp. 28-37.
[34] Marie Deridder, Lotte Pelckmans and Emilia Ward, ‘Reversing the gaze: West Africa performing the EU migration-development-security nexus. Introduction’, Anthropologie et développement 51:9, 2020, pp. 9-32, quoted in Marino et al., “Translating,” pp. 1036-7.
[35] Mathias Czaika and Mogens Hobolth, ‘Do restrictive migration and visa policies increase irregular migration into Europe?’ European Union Politics 17: 3, 2016, pp. 345-365.