Developmental borderwork and the International Organization for Migration

The global governance of borders and migration is increasingly carried out by intergovernmental organisations. Organisations like the IOM epitomise this trend, and with the backdrop of ‘migration crisis’ govern mobility by deploying humanitarian assistance as much as by providing border security expertise. This article argues that we should pay attention to the ways the IOM brings together these seemingly distinct rationales and practices of care and control. It argues that the IOM can be understood as a ‘developmental borderwork’ actor, whose practices are underpinned by a sincere but procedural humanitarianism, a technical focus on best practices and implementation, and an intervention approach drawn from the development industry. To make this argument, the article draws from two empirical trends. First, it examines IOM projects building new border infrastructures and technologies in Mauritania and South Sudan, seeing in these a fusion of security and statebuilding. Second, the article traces the organisation’s development of a humanitarian border management (HBM) concept through which it works to reconcile its emerging migrant protection self-image with member states’ security needs. Each of these cases reflect the tensions within the IOM between humanitarianism, statebuilding, and the persistent reality of state sovereignty

State personhood, abjection and the United States' HIV travel ban

This article understands the United States' 23-year ban on travellers with HIV/AIDS through the lens of state personhood metaphors and the concept of abjection. Using insights from queer theory as a critique of sovereignty, it argues that the practices and discourses that brought about and sustained the ban, from 1987 until its lifting in 2010, relied upon implicit understandings of the state as a national body free from disease. Having shown the heuristic power of metaphors of the state as a body or person, the article goes on to argue that this identification of the American state as a homeostatic and healthy space facilitates the securitisation of mobility and public health and in turn the exclusion of people living with HIV (PLHIV). This rejection of PLHIV, sustained by conservative political discourse as much as by medical screening, nevertheless shows the impossibility of the state attaining its desired purity against HIV/AIDS and its associated sexual and racial imaginaries. The article concludes with an empirical overview of the context of the travel ban through to its lifting in 2010 and a discussion of the role of queer theory as a critique of state sovereignty

Militarism and its limits : Sociological insights on security assemblages in the Sahel

This article assesses the concepts of militarism and militarization in relation to contemporary security interventions in the Sahel, a region increasingly understood through the prisms of violence, cross-border illicit flows, and limited statehood. This region is subject to security interventions that include French military action, EU-funded projects to prevent drug trafficking, and both bilateral and multilateral efforts against irregular migration. To many observers, it is experiencing an ongoing militarization. We argue that while the inextricable concepts of militarism and militarization go some way towards explaining interventions’ occasional use of military violence, they are limited in their grasp of the non-martial and symbolic violence in security practices. We instead propose a focus on assemblages of (in)security to show the heterogeneous mix of global and local actors, and often contradictory rationalities and practices that shape the logics of symbolic and martial violence in the region. Throughout, the article draws on the authors’ fieldwork in Mauritania, Senegal, and Niger, and includes two case studies on efforts against the Sahel’s ‘crime–terror nexus’ and to control irregular migration through the region. The article’s contribution is to better situate debates about militarism and militarization in relation to (in)security and to provide a more granular understanding of the Sahel’s security politics