The International Organization for Migration and the International Government of Borders

Early debates often read globalisation as a powerful tendency destined to make state borders less pertinent. Recent research has challenged this view by suggesting that globalisation and (re)bordering frequently advance hand-in-hand, culminating in a condition that might be described as ‘gated globalism’. But somewhat neglected in this recent wave of research is the role that particular international agencies are playing in shaping the norms and forms that pertain to emergent regimes of border control—what we call the international government of borders. Focusing on the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its involvement in the promotion of what it calls better ‘border management’, this paper aims to partially redress this oversight. The IOM is interesting because it illustrates how the control of borders has become constituted as an object of technical expertise and intervention within programmes and schemes of international authority. Two themes are pursued. First, recent work on neoliberal governmentality is useful for illuminating the forms of power and subtle mechanisms of influence that characterise the IOM's attempt to managerialise border policies in countries as different as Armenia, Ethiopia, and Serbia. Second, the international government of borders comprises diverse and heterogeneous practices, ranging from the hosting of training seminars for local security and migration officials to the promotion of schemes to purchase and install cutting-edge surveillance equipment. In such different ways one can observe in very material terms how the project of making borders into a problem of ‘management’ conflicts with a perception of borders as a site of social struggle and politics.

Abstract. Early debates often read globalisation as a powerful tendency destined to make state borders less pertinent. Recent research has challenged this view by suggesting that globalisation and (re)bordering frequently advance hand-in-hand, culminating in a condition that might be described as`gated globalism'. But somewhat neglected in this recent wave of research is the role that particular international agencies are playing in shaping the norms and forms that pertain to emergent regimes of border control öwhat we call the international government of borders. Focusing on the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its involvement in the promotion of what it calls better`border management', this paper aims to partially redress this oversight. The IOM is interesting because it illustrates how the control of borders has become constituted as an object of technical expertise and intervention within programmes and schemes of international authority. Two themes are pursued. First, recent work on neoliberal governmentality is useful for illuminating the forms of power and subtle mechanisms of influence that characterise the IOM's attempt to managerialise border policies in countries as different as Armenia, Ethiopia, and Serbia. Second, the international government of borders comprises diverse and heterogeneous practices, ranging from the hosting of training seminars for local security and migration officials to the promotion of schemes to purchase and install cutting-edge surveillance equipment. In such different ways one can observe in very material terms how the project of making borders into a problem of`management' conflicts with a perception of borders as a site of social struggle and politics.
from Cunningham (2001, page 382). Far from culminating in the erosion of borders, globalisation is seen to be accompanied by a diffusion, dispersal, and networking of borders such that border functions and border effects are proliferating in proportion to political dynamics of fear, unease, and insecurity, dynamics that are deemed by many to be amongst the most immediate political repercussions of globalisation (Coward, 2005; see also Andreas and Biersteker, 2003). In some versions border controls no longer reflect just the aggregate of each state's national policy, each regime protecting a national territory. Superimposed upon this territorial regime, border controls now work like a matrix, or a global regime, a grid spread across transnational spaces of production, communication, and mobility (Shamir, 2005). Increasingly, they function as the counterpart to a mobile, unequal world. They are, as such, immanent to global processes of production, mobility, and risk and, as Rumford (2006) has suggested, not at the edge of society but internal to emergent transnational or even global social spaces. In this version borders appear less as contiguous lines on the political map and more as zones, bands, intensities of controlöand crucially, contestation.
We share many of the concerns of these investigations of gated globalism, especially their sense that we are witnessing a redeployment and reactivation of borders under new conditions. But in this paper we outline a somewhat different way in which the question of borders might be posed in relation to the question of the global. In the work we have just mentioned, the connection is often posed in relation to an ontology of socioeconomic transformations. That is, scholars have sought to explain the character of borders substantively by referring them to a set of more primary transformationsöglobalisation, transnationalisation, network/control society, risk society, and the like. While this move to place the theorisation of borders and bordering in a wider context is important, it has overlooked something important. Somewhat neglected in this move is the question of the place of borders within concrete schemes of regional, international, and global governance. Our claim is that these important studies of gated globalism have paid insufficient attention to the current world of international programmes, schemes, and agencies which have made the government of borders into an area of expertise, often in a very technical way. The emergence of an entire specialist domain wherein the design, policing, administration, and legal and technical operation of borders has become a field of knowledge in its own right, coupled with a set of administrative measures aimed at reshaping the control of borders, has gone largely unnoticed in much writing about borders. (2) It is this phenomenon we are calling the international government of borders.
Like the institutional practices associated with global governance more broadly, we argue that the international government of borders deserves to be understood as an irreducible domain, with its own dynamics, institutions, logics, personnel, methods, and politics. While processes of regionalisation and globalisation might provide its context, it is not to be understood as the mere reflection of these`larger' phenomena.
(2) There are some significant exceptions here. The most notable is probably the theorisation of the transformation of border controls in Europe. One version of this is largely institution focused and concerned with decision making, policy learning, and`externalisation' of the EU's migration, border, and asylum policies (eg Geddes, 2005;Lavenex and Uc°arer, 2003). A second is more critical and more concerned with what it often describes as the European`border regime' in relation to historical transformations in territoriality, citizenship, and sovereign power (eg Anderson and Bigo, 2003;Mezzadra, 2006;Papadopoulos et al, 2008;Rigo, 2005;Walters, 2002b). This critical literature on the transnational structures of border regimes in Europe overlaps with another body of work that, it should be noted, now also emphasises the need to analyse power at the level of strategies, techniques, programmes, and agencies. This is the literature on the securitisation of migration. See, inter alia, Bigo (2008), Huysmans (2006), and Neal (2009).
Instead, we insist that the international government of borders deserves to be analysed in its own right. That said, a proper mapping of the institutions and agencies currently engaged in the international government of borders is well beyond the scope of this paper. It would address not only the government of borders in relation to human mobilityöwhich is our concernöbut all those other agendas which connect with the question of borders, including trade, socioeconomic development in border regions, cross-border policing, and much else besides.
It is manifestly clear that a plethora of agencies now specialise in advising, assisting, and consulting national governments in diverse aspects of their border managementö for the international government of borders is a crowded, heterogeneous, and sometimes disputed field of expertise and intervention. It includes bodies like Frontex, which bills itself as``an EU agency ... created as a specialised and independent body tasked to coordinate the operational cooperation between Member States in the field of border security''. (3) It includes large corporations like Accenture that have made border management into a commodified service to be marketed within a global economy. (4) It extends to the international agencies, like the International Civil Aviation Organization, that develop and promote technical standards for passports and other systems of border inspection (Stanton, 2008). But it also includes humanitarian organisations like the Jesuit Refugee Service and Me¨decins sans Frontie© res. The more border crossing has become a dangerous and often lethal undertaking for many migrants and refugees, the more humanitarian agencies have found themselves drawn into the pastoral management of bordersöwhether by exercising a critical watch over the detention complexes that are now a common feature of the border systems or by providing humanitarian assistance to migrants at coastlines, in deserts, and at sea, and wherever else migrants make their risky and desperate bids to circumvent the global border regime (Albahari, 2006;Walters, 2010). This paper will focus on one key agency within the international government of borders: the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Representing itself as the migration agency', the IOM today operates as a major source of intelligence, assessment, advice, and technical assistance in connection with national and regional border policies and practices. It does so in connection with a wider claim that it is helping to ensure`the orderly and humane management of migration' on a worldwide basis (IOM, 2009).
The IOM was founded in 1951, the same year as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Initially called Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, it was the product of a Belgian and US initiative (Bojcun, 2005, page 6). However, unlike the UNHCR, the IOM was based on economic rather than humanitarian principles. As Morris explains, whereas the``UNHCR derives its mandate from international law and agreements'', the IOM is``a membership organization, not a UN agency'' (2004, page 43). Nevertheless, it has grown quite significantly in recent years. It now boasts a total of 127 member states and a programme budget for 2008 which exceeds US $1 billion. This sum funds nearly 7000 staff serving in more than 450 field offices in more than 100 countries. It now operates in four main areas of what it calls`migration management': migration and development, facilitating migration, regulating migration, and addressing forced migration (IOM, 2009, page 1).
(3) http://www.frontex.europa.eu (4) Accenture advertise``an integrated approach to border management that spans all agencies with border security, customs and immigration responsibilities''. See http://www.accenture.com/Global/ Services/By Industry/Government and Public Service/Border Management/default.htm While significant in terms of its scale, the IOM's expansion within the field of international borders, migrants, and refugee policy has not been without controversy, particularly as IOM describes key aspects of its activities using the language of humanitarian assistance (Morris, 2004). This has troubled some of the agencies with a longstanding association with humanitarianism; they point out that not only does the IOM lack the proper mandate to act in this area, but it has engaged in activities which actually violate the human rights of migrants. These range from its participation in the asylum determination process`imposed' on Haitian asylum seekers (HRW, 2003, page 1) to its facilitation of the deportation of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand (Morris, 2004, page 43). The IOM's involvement in the management of state borders would appear to be unsettling the borders of the humanitarian complex.
Despite the fact that the IOM has become a major operator in the field of international borders and migration governance, there is surprisingly very little academic research that has interrogated this agency. (5) Migration scholars routinely use IOM material as data and often participate in IOM research and policy programmes. But rarely has the IOM been the subject of critical scrutiny itself. One argument of this paper is that it is high time that the IOM was made an object of inquiry in its own right. As a contribution to this task, this paper focuses on the IOM's involvement in the international government of borders.
We develop two arguments about the IOM and, indirectly, the international government of borders. The first of these concerns the most appropriate way to theorise this phenomenon and assess its political logic. Specifically, we argue that, although concepts like empire are undoubtedly useful in offering a larger narrative in which to place these questions, key insights can be gained by drawing on recent work on the theme of international neoliberalism and global governmentality (Chandler, 2006;Hindess, 2005a;Larner and Walters, 2004;Ong and Collier, 2005). This line of analysis depicts global governance less as a project of creating an entirely new regime of power operating on a global level somewhere`above' the world of states and much more as a complex of schemes which govern through the elicitation of state agency and the regulated enhancement and deployment of state capacity. This move has several theoretical benefits, not the least of which is to specify what is novel about contemporary regimes and programmes of international order.
Second, we argue that the field of activities and programmes of agencies like the IOM should be taken much more seriously and regarded as a sphere meriting careful empirical study. While it may appear as a rather dull space of technical concepts and managerial practices, a more nuanced understanding of the international government of borders requires us to carefully interrogate these practices. These should be studied not primarily as a matter of offering a more fine-grained analysis of a bigger process. Rather, a close reading of practices like`border management',`assisted voluntary return', and`capacity building' offers important insights about the ethos and rationality of international government. It brings into focus that this is a terrain comprising multiple power relations, tactics, and manoeuvres. It develops the point that this is not a system which works by coercion or discipline alone but, as numerous studies of contemporary governmentality (eg Rose, 1999) have stressed, through the calculated construction of states and other collectivities as subjects who bear an ability and a responsibility to shape their futures by making informed and strategic choices.
(5) A notable exception is Du« vell (2003), whom we discuss below. The activities and politics of the IOM has been extensively discussed, sometimes quite polemically, within activist networks. In particular, see http://www.noborder.org/iom/index.php. For an official history of the IOM see Ducasse-Rogier (2001).

Two versions of neoliberalism
Whereas specific border sites like the land crossing (Sparke, 2004), the seaport (Chalfin, 2006), and the airport (Salter, 2007) have been examined in some depth, and while, as we noted above, there has been much discussion of the globalisation of border controls and a new global regime of mobility control, there has been relatively little investigation of those international agencies and programmes whose business it is to promote standards and to regulate and communicate norms about border control. Correspondingly, the activity of the IOM, possibly the main actor in this respect, has gone largely unnoticed. However, there are exceptions to this rule. Perhaps the most notable is Du« vell's investigation of the IOM, which he frames in terms of the globalisation of migration control (Du« vell, 2003). Du« vell astutely observes that recent years have seen a range of transnational migration agencies rise to prominence. Their advance has gone hand-in-hand with recognition on the part of policy makers and experts that new concepts, programmes, scales, and frameworks for migration policy are necessary in the face of the`challenge' of globalisation. Rebranding itself as à global' organisation, and operating within a division of regulatory labour alongside agencies devoted to the humanitarian (eg UNHCR) and the securitarian (eg International Centre for Migration Policy Development), the IOM is a key element within this transnational regime.
Du« vell's discussion of the IOM is helpful in a number of ways. First, he conveys a sense of the broad array of activities which now fall under IOM's remit. These range from offering advice and technical assistance to national governments in implementing detention centres and the development of campaigns to`combat' the trafficking of women to quite specific activities like the compensation of non-Jewish victims of Nazism's slave-labour programmes. (6) In this paper we are interested in one aspect of the IOM's activities and programmes: how they are making borders into a space of expert knowledge and international policy. As we will show in the following section, this is done under the rubric of advancing an`integrated', or`comprehensive', approach to migration control. Within this larger framework, border management is one componentöalbeit a central oneöof a wider set of measures that have come to be associated with the idea of`migration management'. Second, Du« vell's take on the IOM is significant as it challenges the technocratic self-representation of the IOM. For example, he observes how the often grubby and sometimes violent activity of deporting people is represented within the IOM's discourse in the irenic language of`assisted voluntary return'.
Third, and it is this point we wish to emphasise, Du« vell's account is important because he insists on the need to understand discourses of migration and border managementöcontrary to their appeal to a self-evident commonsense (eg who would disagree that complicated and risky things should be managed )öas emblematic of very particular modes of normalisation. This is not a term Du« vell uses himself, but we think it is implicit in the way he interprets the IOM's agenda for migration. As Du« vell sees it, the IOM is not in the business of opposing all migration, as certain nationalist and protectionist movements might be. Instead, it calls for migration to be regulated, shaped, and harnessed:``Such a strategy ... aims to distinguish between the productive and the unproductive elements of migration movements and turn the former into a driving force of economic growth'' (2003, page 5). In this way Du« vell enjoins us to see IOM as an agency oriented to the rationalisation of the migration policies of those countries that find themselves situated for the most part outside the blocs of the (6) For a detailed analysis of the IOM's countertrafficking campaigns in various Eastern European countries see Andrijasevic (2007). world's richest states. Its main goal, as he sees it, is to align the migration policies of regions like West Africa and South America with the migration control norms and aspirations of the global North. In shaping the migration control strategies of thesè third countries' and regions, IOM concerns itself with the difficult task of sorting mobile populations into streams of the useful and useless, admissible and returnable, employable and deportable. In this way IOM's work could be understood as an element within projects to consolidate a global hierarchy of mobility and new arrangements of labour that correspond in broad outline with the image of flexible capitalism.
While we agree with the broad thrust of Du« vell's analysis, our argument here is that it can be further sharpened in at least one direction. It can be honed, we argue, by connecting it to recent advances in the theorisation of international neoliberalism. More specifically, we think that the analysis of the international government of borders can be fruitfully brought into a dialogue with a line of analysis first opened by Foucault's (2007; lectures on the history of governmentality and neoliberalism and recently developed in the context of the government of states by Hindess (2002;2005a;2005b) and others (eg Dean 2007).
At this point it might be useful to ask how the Foucauldian perspective on neoliberalism might differ from the account that is more commonly found within the tradition of critical and Marxist political economy. While it would be unhelpful to overstate their differences ö indeed, it would be more profitable to examine whether their insights might be combined more fruitfully (7) ö it could certainly be said that the Foucauldian account concentrates largely on analysing neoliberalism as a new ethos of rule. Critical political economy has interpreted neoliberalism as a highly contradictory project to revitalise a certain model of unfettered market capitalism, coupled with a more or less coordinated programme aiming at the economic and cultural (re)empowerment of managerial, financial, and entrepreneurial elites and class fractions. (8) By comparison, the Foucauldian perspective has sought to understand neoliberalism in terms of certain political arts, strategies, and technologies capable of remaking governance and subjectivity not just across the sectors of the state but across social, cultural, and economic life more broadly (Lemke, 2001;Rose, 1999). The essence of this rationality is its search for mechanisms which elicit, produce and generalise choice-making subjectivities and enterprising modes of conduct and which embed such subjectivities within a host of calculative and administrative practices, including performance indicators, new forms of auditing and accounting, and other techniques for devolving and reshaping responsibilities across bureaucracies, firms, welfare offices, charities, and much else. In this reading there is much more to neoliberalism than merely the negative move of deregulating social and economic sectors, the strategic use of the state to activate society, or the ideological celebration of the market.
The Foucauldian account of neoliberalism therefore sensitises us to the complex workings of power within and beyond the state. In the case of our analysis this is a point about the particular modes of power which transnational agencies of migration governance bring into play. We will briefly mention it here before returning to it at length in the following section. As Hindess notes, neoliberalism is often characterised as a disciplinary and coercive enterprise that weighs down upon subject peoples and states, imposing the logic of corporate capitalism upon them. Yet, to characterise it in such terms is somewhat misleading. Hindess notes:`P rogrammes of social reform seldom operate solely through coercive means ... . [L]ike its older siblings ... [neoliberalism] prefers to work through the freely chosen actions of states and other agents, and it is promoted by a variety of state and nonstate actors ... . It also relies on agencies ... which have no coercive powers of their own and which operate rather through persuasion and example, suggesting to activists, states and other agencies ways in which they might address their concerns and insisting, most particularly, on the role of civil society, the private sector, NGOs and international agencies'' (2005b, page 1397). If neoliberal rule has achieved a certain durability and hegemony domestically, it is because of its ability to connect with the profusion of mechanisms located at some distance from the state which foster and sometimes compel new modes of individual and collective responsibility. These range from the advent of an intricate (and now crisis-ridden) field of personal finance, to the burgeoning markets of selfhelp and self-analysis, and their accompanying industries of therapeutic expertise. In these and many other ways, neoliberalism has advanced not just through the grand projects of globalisation and financialisation but through countless small, molecular, and only partially coordinated transformations in the management and self-management of everyday life.
In a recent series of papers Hindess has extended certain of these Foucauldian insights to think about neoliberalism not just as a mode of governing domestic societies but as an art of international government (2002; 2005a; 2005b). Central to this neoliberal art of international government is the fact of a fundamental reorientation of international authority in its relationship between the metropolitan powers and the countries and peoples who were formerly its imperial subjects. If domestically neoliberalism can be said to govern by constructing responsible individuals and enmeshing them in games of self-governance, international neoliberalism finds its correlate in a formally postimperial world order, that is, one populated by legally independent states:`[ F]ar from promoting a deterritorialized apparatus of rule, as Hardt and Negri suggest, the emerging global order in fact relies upon the capacity of territorial states to govern their own populations. The promotion of democracy, good governance, and human rights by international development agencies and financial institutions is designed to further reinforce these capacities'' (2005a, page 256). This observation that a great deal of the work of international agencies today is oriented not to the dismantling of state power but towards establishing the viability of certain forms of statehood, and cultivating a regulated form of state sovereignty, could certainly be read alongside other critical work about`conditional sovereignty'. For example, in his work on development and humanitarian aid practices, Duffield (2001) shows how donor governments and multilateral agencies alike treat the sovereignty of weaker or contested states in the unstable zones of the world system (which he refers to as`borderlands') as a conditional status. This conditional sovereignty is contingent upon the internationalisation of public policy, the achievement of social, economic, and political stability via public^private contractual networks and the growing involvement of nonstate actors. Metropolitan governments are reluctant to intervene directly in the internal affairs of third countries. Instead, the governing of these troubled zones takes place through sectorally specific interventions implemented by nonstate and private organisations within the framework where security is redefined as a problem of development (Duffield, 2001, pages 311^312). This line of analysis makes a great deal of sense when applied to the case of the IOM. With the IOM we are faced with a concerted attempt to generalise a particular model of statehood within the domain of migration politics. Embedded in IOM programmes are a whole set of norms and best practices concerning the appropriate organisation of borders; the imperative and best methods for identifying and distinguishing between the citizen and the noncitizen, and the resident and the illegal; the most effective ways of removing noncitizen and unwanted populations from a state's territory; and much else besides.
There may well be strong continuities between what Du« vell calls`classical imperialism', and the way in which the major states today use a combination of economic, political, financial, and even military inducements to win the active participation of countries like Libya, Morocco, and Mexico in their migration control strategies. Nevertheless, our point will be that the IOM's mode of operation is distinctly neoliberal ö and, crucially, postimperial ö in at least one important respect. If it becomes involved in the governance of borders in the global borderlands, this encounter takes the form of a regulated choice not an imposition. It is patterned as a situation in which IOM methods and norms are not imposed but`learnt' in contexts such as seminars and fieldtrips where the IOM's expertise has been invited. Just as neoliberalism governs at the level of society through a game in which citizens will work upon themselves to become fitter, happier, and more competitive under the tutelage of relevant forms of expertise, then so will the IOM intervene in the international government of borders as a`partner' and a`consultant' assisting states who, for various reasons, express a will to get their own borders in order, as it were. Ultimately, our point is not to treat the imperial and the postimperial as mutually exclusive concepts. Some`choices' made by governments in the global South are going to be more`voluntary' than others. But it is important to note the extent to which international government today operates and is legitimated not by direct coercion but by its elicitation of the active involvement of the states of the Global South.
The`problem' of borders Extending the Foucauldian idea of government as a complexly layered and heterogeneous activity involving the`conduct of conduct', Merlingen has argued persuasively that the work of international governmental organisations (IGOs) can be fruitfully understood as the``international conduct of the conduct of countries'' (2003, page 367). This captures nicely the way in which many IGOs engage in strategies of control which work not in a direct sense, imposing their will on those regions of the world designated as`developing countries', but by shaping the discursive environment within which particular states pose the problem of how to govern specific issues and the means they might use to pursue governmental objectives. (9) Central to this activity of the international conduct of the conduct of countries is the labour which IGOs undertake to``objectify reality into a terrain to be governed, ie, how they discursively constitute phenomena as problems whose solution requires international interventions'' (pages 367^368).
As a first task, any attempt to understand the IOM's role in the international government of borders and its agency in the normalisation of the conduct of border control would do well to ask this question: How is the IOM responsible for producing a specific discourse about borders, and how does this cast the border as a particular terrain of expert intervention? The point is that history reveals a great degree of variation in the way in which borders have been deemed problematic. So, to put it differently, how does the IOM pose the border as a problem? For the IOM the border (9) This point about the power of language and expertise has, of course, been made at length by critical studies of the discourse and apparatus of development and the role played by IGOs and social scientists within its networks. See, inter alia, Escobar (1995), Ferguson (2006), and Mitchell (2002). is not a question of balancing the competing territorial claims of states and interests of the major powers, as it was for diplomats and statespersons overseeing Europe's military-diplomatic' technology of the 17th and 18th centuries (Foucault, 2007, page 296). Nor is the border a means for aligning the racially and ethnically coded map of population with the space of territory and sovereignty, as it was for many of the experts engaged in the kinds of discussions that framed the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Crampton, 2007).
The problem of borders as understood by the IOM is of a somewhat different order, for it is much closer to a discourse in which borders are regarded not as geomilitary instruments within games of statecraft, or lines that express a particular division of the Earth amongst its peoples but instead as privileged mechanisms within the policing of global movements and fluid processes. The IOM operates on a discursive terrain where borders are not so much concerned with the containment of population and territory as they are with regulating the terms on which global processes will play themselves out in a world which, for all its apparent flux and fluidity, remains segmented juridically and politically into national spaces. This does not mean that themes of`defending' territory and society from migratory`invasion' do not continue to animate the political scene in which the IOM intervenes. Nor is it to overlook the persistence of practices whereby the border features prominently as a defensive wall or as an instrument of territorial acquisition. (10) But it is to say that, however polemically potent the image of`Fortress Europe' or`Fortress America' might be, it rather misses the point that the contemporary ordering of borders is much closer to a space of nodes and networks, of gateways, filters, and passage points, than it is to the old idea of borders as defensive lines. This is the overall context which defines the kind of`problem' of borders which the IOM speaks to. But the IOM does not simply reproduce a more general discursive and political economy of borders. Instead, we want to insist that it plays a constructive and constitutive role, making important interventions which actually shape and define the way in which states, through their national experts, policy makers, border guards, etc, understand the`problem' of borders. To clarify this point, we need to attend to the specific terms and frameworks which the IOM uses to represent the question of borders. Here we want to begin by observing that a great deal of the IOM's reflection and prescription regarding borders is conducted under the heading of`border management', a concept that is in turn closely related to the idea of`migration management'.
The IOM insists that effective border management is integral to the wider aim of migration management. As such, it calls for states to adopt, develop, and improve what it calls border management systems. The aim of such systems, we are told, is twofold. They must both``facilitate bona fide travellers, providing a welcoming and efficient gateway to the state'' and also``provide a barrier and disincentive to entry for those seeking to circumvent migration laws''. (11) It is this difficult task of reconciling principles of efficiency, mobility, and speed with a particular vision of security and control that lies at the heart of the problem of border management. It is a task which seems to (10) Both the fact of the persistence of borders as defensive apparatuses and instruments for territorial appropriation, and that there has been considerable innovation in these practices, is confirmed by Weizman's (2007) study of the ongoing rebordering of the West Bank. Like other recent discussions of the return of walled and fenced frontiers (eg Newman, 2009), Weizman's work reminds us that the government of borders is not confined to border-crossing points, whether at airports, seaports, or on land. There is also the matter of how long stretches of frontier on land and sea are to be controlled. This is not a question we have addressed here, though it would be interesting to know whether the design, building, and management of border walls is also now a space of international expertise and activity. (11) See IOM,``Border management systems'', http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/pid/279 constitute the problem of the border as a zone of experimentation and innovation in technologies of government. Many of these experiments in governance look to cutting-edge technoscience to mediate the problem of the border. (12) But we should not overlook the countless and varied social technologies that play an integral yet largely unexamined role in the international government of borders. It is through such ordinary practices as the distribution of handbooks to local police officials, training seminars for border inspectors, study visits for immigration officials, and even hosting lunches to cultivate a certain familiarity between border experts and their international (and usually western) counterparts that an agency like IOM endeavours to shape the way border control is conducted in particular problematic countries and regions.
It is this heterogeneous domain of social interventions that most interests us in this paper, and we return to it shortly. But, first, it is necessary to make some further brief comments on the idea of border management. The point here is that, however commonsensical it may soundöie the implicit claim that good borders are well-managed bordersöit is far from self-evident or inevitable that the question of the organisation of borders should be framed as one of`management'. As such, there is a need to unpack the idea of border management. We have three points to make.
First, the idea of border management entails a somewhat new imagination of the governmental space of borders. Here we want to emphasise that the IOM speaks of borders as though they occupy a space modelled in the image of the cybernetic. Borders are now imagined as instruments which operate in the context of multiplè interconnected subsystems'. This would seem to be a heterogeneous domain since it includes trained personnel, an audit capability, interagency and international cooperation, and strategic partnerships with carriers and industry. (13) Technological capacities, such as the means to issue, regulate, and process machine-readable passports and visas are part of this management system. But so are legal and bureaucratic elements such as a framework for migration policy through which IOM`assists' states to put in place a national policy framework which defines migration laws and sets out entry, stay, and removal regulations. As IOM succinctly puts it:``The effectiveness of the border management system is ... significantly affected by the rules and processes chosen to enforce the conditions under which entry is permitted, including commitment to locating and removing those who breach the conditions of their stay.'' (14) Second, the idea of a border management system encompasses a certain practice of reflexivity. IOM insists that well-managed borders are those that generate data which in turn are to be used by national agencies to monitor their own performance and also by international agencies. This flow of quantitative data, subsequently managed and optimised, is generated via a multifaceted control of borders. This gives rise to what we call a managerialisation of borders in the sense that the border system is engineered as something that has a capacity for constant and ongoing self-monitoring. It is even perhaps possible to speak of metagovernance of borders given IOM's efforts to create and set in place a so-called``General Model'' for the``creation, collection, application and sharing of migration related data'' among Eastern Europe and Central Asian countries. (15) (12) For example, see the recent literature on the application of`biometrics' to border control. Biometrics has quickly emerged as a multibillion-dollar technology market offering high-tech solutions to countless different securitised contexts, ranging from voter registration in`emerging' democracies to the policing of national borders. Some of the most insightful work includes Amoore (2006), Sparke (2004), and van der Ploeg (2006). For a critical discussion of the idea of technology as a`fix' for security see Bigo and Carrera (2005 Seen in this light, border management is not merely a matter of border guards being tasked with controlling the flows of people and things that traverse the frontier, discriminating between the bona fide and the bogus. Nor is it just a matter of managing the tensions between a commitment to human rights, commerce, and security. It is, in addition, and as a means to accomplish these ends, a matter of managing the condition of, and the interrelationships between, a host of different domains. This activity is made all the more complex once it is recognised that IOM sees the commitment to effective`prefrontier strategies' as an integral element of border management. These strategies involve a certain dispersal of control functions away from the usual border settings and their relocation at points of embarkation. The strategies also include harmonisation of visa and passports to the international standards via biometrics and machine-readable travel documents;`passenger preinspection' at points of embarkation so as to identify fraudulent documents and prevent onward unauthorised travel; and carrier sanctions in order to make carriers accountable for embarking and transporting undocumented migrants. (16) Finally, the constitution of borders as a problem of management goes handin-hand with the emergence of new forms of authority and expertise. In short, management affirms a more pronounced role for managers and managerial styles of reasoning. The tendency towards managerialism within national and international contexts of public administration has been extensively documented (Parker, 2002;Power, 1994;Rose, 1996). The extension of managerialism into public health sectors, welfare regimes, transportation systems, etc has meant that the substantive expertise of doctors, educators, social workers, and other professions has been confronted with the more formal expertise associated with accountancy, auditing, finance, marketing and managementö what Nikolas Rose (1996, page 54) aptly terms the``grey sciences''. Quite often the social professions find themselves enmeshed in managerialist grids of calculability. While we lack the space to explore the point here, there may be good grounds for applying a similar analysis to the governance of borders. Let us just say that the border has always been a crowded place, crowded not just because travellers gather there but also because a host of other experts and authorities have a stakeöintelligence officers, military strategists, police authorities, customs and immigration officials, geographers, hygienists, and so on. Under the auspices of`border management' it now becomes all the more crowded. The work of agencies like the IOM adds a new layer of expertise to the various specialisms which have long been a feature of the machinery of bordering. This new layer operates transversally and transnationally, assessing, recalibrating, and integrating the existing and new practices.
Standards, norms, capacities A significant body of research has explored how technical norms have come to play an integral role in the constitution and governance of transnational zones and global spaces (Barry, 2006;Larner and Le Heron, 2004). It is quite evident that we cannot fully grasp the decentralised style of neoliberal governance on a global scale without considering the constitutive work of technical norms, standards, and regulations. Particular attention has been paid to standards concerning the movement of goods and materials, especially in the constitution of European space (Chalfin, 2006;Dunn, 2005). But with the IOM we see how the cross-border mobility, and also the immobility of human subjects, becomes subject to governance by and through technical norms. Here IOM works as a mediator, communicating norms and standards (16) http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/pid/599 that in some cases it has formulated itself, (17) or in other instances, norms and standards specific to other programmes and agencies [eg the International Civil Aviation Organization, which is the principal authority on standards for passports (see Stanton, 2008)].
What place do technical norms have in the international government of borders? It would certainly be useful to examine how technical norms relating to the management of borders are formulated. (18) Here one could follow the lead of scholars of technopolitics and explore the micropolitical contests and controversies which play out within and between institutions and experts engaged in the formulation of technical norms [see Hecht (1998;; on the case of the`e-passport' see Stanton (2008)]. But here we insist it is equally important to consider how technical norms are communicated and promoted in particular local contexts. Consider the following short case.
In June 2007 the IOM's Special Liaison Mission in Addis Ababa staged a threeday workshop dedicated to``capacity-building training in migration and border management'' (IOM, 2007, no page). The event was directed primarily towards Ethiopian immigration and intelligence officers. The framing of the announcement for the seminar is quite instructive and speaks nicely to the political rationality at work within the international government of borders. Let us quote it at length:`T he training ... aims to build and address existing or identified gaps in the institutional capacities of Ethiopian border and immigration authorities to effectively manage migration, including passport and visa systems, fraudulent document detection, impostor recognition and intelligence profiling as well as the use of biometrics in migration management. IOM experts conducting the training will familiarize participants with new migration management learning tools and standards developed by the international community, including the IOM curriculum on Essentials of Migration Management [EMM], the International Agenda for Migration Managements and the International Civil Aviation Organization standards'' (IOM, 2007, no page). This is, of course, only one of many training events and workshops which the IOM hosts or partners as it pursues its worldwide mission. Observing these practices from (17) For example, see the three-volume publication Essentials of Migration Management (EMM) (IOM, 2004a). Designed to``expand the knowledge and facilitate the work of government policy makers, practitioners, academics, organizations as well as IOM staff members'', and comprising`l earning objectives, case studies, [and] a guide to applying the subject matter to specific situations'', this text is clearly much more than just a publication. In typical`management speak', IOM describes this as a`learning tool' (IOM, 2005). The claim is supported by the fact that EMM itself circulates within particular international networks of expertise. Indeed, EMM has its own dedicated newsletter which hints at the global geography of IOM's border-related pedagogy. From Tirana to Tehran, and from Brussels to Bangkok, seminars and workshops are taking place which accord the EMM a central place in their activity. Reading the newsletter, one gets the faint suggestion of a religious mission to spread the Word, especially the enthusiastic reporting of each new initiative to translate the EMM, or relevant sections, into the local language. For instance, we are told that at a recent meeting of the Bangladesh Migration and Development Forum,``Interest was expressed in translating portions of the EMM into Bengali''. Likewise, IOM's Tehran office is considering the translation of EMM into Farsi to improve its accessibility to policy makers and practitioners (IOM, 2005). (18) While we cannot enter into the question of the making of technical norms here, certain insights as to their form and content are offered by even a brief reading of the EMM. One of the striking features of this document is the fact that, much in the way of any typical textbook, it is structured to foster various self-problematising activities in its audienceöin this instance the border and migration officials of various states. the outside ö that is, at the level of their promotional material and agendasö is obviously limited. It tells us nothing about the social milieu of the workshop. For instance, it would be interesting to know how the Ethiopian officials in question negotiated the event. Clearly, further studies in the international government of borders will benefit if researchers can undertake detailed, ethnographic investigations into sites and practices like these training seminars. (19) Yet there are still insights about the management of borders we can glean from this case. First, notice how this exercise works on and around an existing regime which is depicted as a set of`institutional capacities'. In a manoeuvre, which we might read as exemplary of the international government of government, it does not seek to govern migration flows from scratch or directly. Instead, it engages with a given institutional regime but does so in a way that seeks to reshape it, augmenting certain aspects, identifying`gaps' elsewhere.
Second, there is the matter of what the IOM calls`capacity building'. This returns us to the issue we flagged in our introduction: the central role which regulated choice and structured consent plays within the international government of borders. Capacity building frames governance not as an external imposition but as a relationship in which target states are helped to improve their own situation. Governance proceeds with the assumption that a will to improve one's capacity exists as a desire that is immanent to the state in question. As the head of IOM's Division on Technical Cooperation puts it:``One of IOM's core responsibilities is that of assisting our Members and Observers, and at times other States, in developing their capacity to manage migration'' (Harns, 2004, page 1). As it could be observed, the aim of IOM's capacity-building programmes is to complement and enhance national, bilateral, and multilateral cooperation among governments. These programmes ö which include project design, implementation, development of national strategies, and assistance to governments to undertake legislative reforms ö are shaped as partnerships between IOM, governments, and other partners and funders and work to define needs, priorities, and interventions in matters of migration.
Here international government can be analysed along two axes. The first is the axis of facilitation and capacitation. This may include schemes like the Addis Ababa workshop discussed aboveöhosted by the IOM but funded by the British Embassy in Ethiopia. The workshop was later to be followed by a`study tour' to the United Kingdom, conceived in terms of an opportunity for Ethiopian officials to become acquainted with cutting-edge social practices and technologies and, no doubt, to forge informal ties with British and other policing networks.
In a similar vein, one sees the IOM sponsoring pilot programmes or raising support and funds from the international community in order to promote particular border projects. In this area IOM reveals another aspect of neoliberal governance: it acts like an entrepreneur, identifying opportunities for security projects, then bringing together NGOs, states, experts, and private companies to forge networks of support (19) For some fascinating observations about one such event, see the field notes of a Noborders activist who gained access to a small IOM conference on`assisted voluntary return' in Birmingham, UK. For instance, the activist notes that the IOM official running the conference addressed his audience like a`PR expert'. This was apparently consistent with the fact that the IOM official was previously employed as a publicity manager for the British department store John Lewis and had also worked as a managing director of Euro Eddy's Family Fun Centre, a giant indoor playground for children in Leipzig, Germany! See``Inside the IOM Birmingham Conference'', at http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/07/403079.html and implementation. One example of these practices comes from the biometrics market. In Armenia the IOM office in Yerevan has been running a Border Management International System Programme. (20) This targeted Bagratashen, Armenia's most important land border with Georgia. The aim of the project was to set in place a network to link all ports of entry into one comprehensive information system. The project was funded by the USA Embassy through its International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Programme and implemented in partnership with the Aviainfotel group, experts in airport management information systems. (21) We say more about forms of facilitation and partnering below.
The second axis is one that we might call normative or peer pressure. In a document dedicated to the question of passports and visas the IOM assumes a voice that is somewhat more authoritative and pedagogical than in the entrepreneurial narrative. It observes sternly that``Your State's passports, travel documents, and visas are important to how your State is perceived in the international community. By making these documents highly secure, your State contributes to the fight against international crime and terrorism.'' (22) While the IOM does not elaborate, there is perhaps a subtext here: failure to meet the`international community's' standards risks the perception that you are a weak link in the security chain, or at worst, a`failed state' where disorder breeds, spilling over into the international community. (23) The provision of funding, technical, and logistical support, coupled with a climate of diplomatic and geopolitical normativity, constitutes important dynamics underpinning the international government of borders. It helps to explain how the IOM is able to disseminate norms and standards that reshape the landscape of bordering practices. However, a fuller appreciation of the international government of borders is possible only if we consider the wider field of networking and partnership. It is where IOM can align its activities with larger projects of regional governmentality, development, and aid that we can expect its activities to have their fuller effects. The most intense form of this is surely connected with the enlargement of the EU. It is to this scene that we turn in the following section. It is here that IOM can work with the grain of states that strive to join the EU. Since a crucial pillar of meeting the standards for EU membership is the demonstrated ability of applicant states to properly govern their respective borders and exposure to migratory processes, the geopolitics of European`enlargement' provides a particularly fertile ground for the development and implementation of IOM projects.
(20) http://www.iom.int/armenia/projects/cbmmp.htm. See Bojcun (2005) for a fuller discussion of the IOM's promotion of capacity-building projects in the context of Ukraine. Bojcun offers some valuable insights about IOM's working methods, especially its project-oriented approach. He documents how the IOM assisted Ukraine in setting up a`demonstration project' on its eastern border with Russia in the Kharkiv^Belgorod vicinity. Drawing on the results of the project, the IOM Kiev Mission Chief Steve Cook commentated:``That sector of the border, previously the most travelled by illegal migrants, has been basically shut down ... that's what we wanted to demonstrate, and as a result we've got sufficient donor funds to develop another project on the Ukrainian-Belorussian border'' (quoted in Bojcun, 2005, page 6). (21) http://www.usa.am/news/2008/december/news121608.php (22) http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/about-migration/managing-migration/passport-visa-systems/ cache/offonce;jsessionid=0969CA18FD3E963DCFEDD0E97A90A9E4.worker01 (23) On the discourse and politics of`failed states', and their resonance with imperial justifications for interventions in the international order, see Jones (2008) and Morton and Bilgon (2002).

Partnerships, networks, regions
How does the international government of borders intersect with particular spatialisations of government, such as the network and the region, and particular ethicalised stylings of government, such as the partnership and the dialogue? (24) The area that IOM demarcates as the`Western Balkans' offers one particular setting where the operationalisation of the international government of borders through networks and partnerships is quite evident.
Across the Western Balkans IOM is involved in projects that deliver to governments legal expertise in the matters of migration and support the development of the National Action Plans (NAPs). The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), oriented towards the countries of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean that have no prospects of imminent EU membership, offers these countries increased political, security, economic, and cultural cooperation geared towards future integration. The ENP avails itself of action plans, namely a set of common priorities to be agreed with each partner country. The idea of the action plan is now widespread across many policy domains, both domestic and international. Rather than taking it at face value, or merely dismissing this as policy jargon, we insist that action plans should be understood as a key technique through which governments become constructed as agents bearing ethical responsibility and calculability for reforming particular policy domains. It is the instrument of the action plan that configures a new kind of relationship between governments, the international community, and the control of state borders. For example, Integrated Border Management (IBM) in the Western Balkans ö developed in light of the adoption of national strategies and national action plans ö consists of institution-building (border guard and customs), coordination and harmonisation of procedures, upgrading of the information technology systems, and equipment supply and infrastructure works such as border demarcation, surveillance equipment, etc (CARDS, 2004, page 27). Developed under the framework of the external dimension of the common European asylum and immigration policy with the aim of integrating asylum into the EU's external relations with third countries, this modality of cooperation is geared towards amending countries' existing migration and asylum policies so as to enable regional and European integration of the Western Balkans.
The IOM here plays a crucial role at the national level. This takes place, for example, in Serbia via direct participation in working groups set up for the drafting of legislation on aliens, asylum, and citizenship (IOM, 2004b). In Croatia the IOM promotes the Migration Policy Advisory Study, which aims to review policy on migration and make recommendations for a new policy. In both countries the IOM offers training in EU law and immigration and asylum policy to government officials, representatives of international organisations, NGOs, and other agencies. The aim is to introduce from a legal point of view the EU immigration and asylum policy to officials and practitioners working on the development or implementation of national migration strategies.
IOM intervenes also at the regional level. In the Western Balkans border management is part of the IOM's implementation of the so-called`migration module' in the project``Establishment of EU compatible legal, regulatory and institutional framework in the field of asylum, migration and visa matters'' (IOM, 2004a). (25) The project is (24) On the question of how to analyse spatialisations and imagined territories of government see Rose (1999, pages 34^40). For a discussion of the region as a particular spatialisation of government and its connection to neoliberalism see Larner and Walters (2002). For excellent accounts of the network as both space and technology of rule see Duffield (2001) on aid and development and Barry (1996) on European governance. (25) For a short description of this project as well as a more comprehensive overview of similar projects see http://www.iom.hu/regprojects/rm completed.html#tcm organised in three modules, each implemented by a different body. The asylum module is carried out by the UNHCR, the visa module by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and the migration module by the IOM. The project's objective is to support Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro in fulfilling the requirements of the Schengen acquis and those set up by the Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs). The latter are the contractual instruments of the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP) adopted in 2000 with the aim to offer to the countries of the Western Balkans a prospect of full European integration. Given the stakes of EU membership, it might seem that states' collaboration with IOM is a matter of coercion and that the EU is imposing its norms and standards for border control upon the countries of the Western Balkans. However, we insist that the situation is more complex. The EU has, indeed, collectively defined standards and norms for a particular regime of borders and controls. The IOM, however, does not simply function as a missionary, preaching the gospel of good migration management to a series of reluctant and recalcitrant governments situated at the modern-day limes of the EU. As one IOM official associated with the organisation's Belgrade office explains it, in the case of the IOM's work with the Serbian Government:`I t is the other way around. We work everywhere on invitation of governments. The objective of the government is to move towards the EU standards. We work with the government more as a partner, we have an advisory role when it comes to provision of resources, we provide information on EU standards, facilitate the cooperation/talks with other governments in the region, with the counterparts in western Europe on what standards and practices are there. ... We are helping them to meet the priorities they have laid out and as far as they need advice, specifically on technical and policy issues of migration. One of the objectives of the government here has to do with accession so we are trying to develop a larger framework of border management and this involves standards concerning entry and admission. We are providing inputs, establishing a strategy structure and eventually legislative initiatives or ministerial instructions to implement some of the standards they are trying to develop'' [personal communication on 21 July 2004 as part of the Transit Migration research project (http://www.transitmigration.org).
The activities and programmes that IOM implements and partakes in the case of Western Balkan states are part of the regime that is disseminating norms and standards geared towards EU accession. (26) Through these the IOM has gained varying degrees of influence over the internal affairs of the governments it works with, leading to its involvement in shaping their social and political processes as well. Private^public networks and partnerships between the IOM, the EU, governments of Western Balkan states, and NGOs are key to this process. In fact, following Duffield, we can observe the``thickening of international ... networks between metropolitan and borderland areas'' (2001, page 309). These networks are part of what Duffield identifies as organisational innovation in the ways in which metropolitan states govern the borderlands. Governing through international assistance networks and private associations creates new forms of interaction and dependency between states and nonstate actors via contracts, standards (performance indicators), and partnerships and constitutes (26) We have focused here on IOM programmes in the Western Balkans given the limits of place. It is worth noting that the IOM has been involved in similar projects geared towards EU enlargement under the so-called Soderkoping Process, namely the cross-border cooperation process between three`clusters' of countries (1) Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; (2) Ukraine, Hungary, and Slovakia; and (3) Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. novel and flexible forms of alliances and power configuration (2001, page 318). These have elsewhere been discussed as examples of``shared sovereignty'' (Rigo, 2007) and`o verlapping sovereignty'' (Ong, 2006) so as to indicate that the transformations in the mode of governing are resulting in state sovereignty being`shared' among different state and nonstate actors and are engendering differently administrated spaces and patterns of noncontiguous sovereignty. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to engage in debates about sovereign power, what we want to stress is that the case of the IOM's interventions in the Western Balkans (IOM competes for EC tenders, Western Balkan states contract IOM, and IOM approaches governments in terms of`clients') shows that the relationships between state and nonstate actors is not one of straightforward imposition; rather, it points to a significant reworking of international authority and power as it takes place via the international government of borders.
The neoliberal government of deportation As we have shown in the previous section, IOM programmes seek to implicate states in new regimes which govern them through regulated autonomy, networks, and partnerships. In this final section we would also like to draw attention to a neoliberal element introduced into the actual practices by which states govern borders and populations. This can be illustrated through the example of so-called Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes geared towards removing rejected asylum seekers and stranded and irregular migrants and returning them to their countries of departure. First carried out in Germany in 1970, over the years the IOM has greatly expanded the number and scope of these initiatives. In 2004 it ran twenty AVR programmes, removing migrants from eighteen European countries. (27) As with many of the other IOM programmes described above, AVRs are implemented by the IOM in collaboration with governments and NGOs and hence developed as private^public partnerships.
Scholars and activists have been quick to criticise the IOM's AVR programmes, pointing out that the use of the adjective`voluntary' in relation to deportation is a contradiction in terms. As in the case of Lampedusa, for example, Italy's most southern island and the entry point for irregular migration from Libya, the IOM's involvement in deporting asylum seekers and irregular migrants from Lampedusa's detention centre to Libyaö operations often executed by use of force ö suggests that when migrants make the decision to return under duress or as an alternative to stateenforced expulsions,`voluntary' seems to designate an absence of viable options rather than a deliberate choice. (28) Yet let us offer an example of another AVR programme, this time run by IOM in the Netherlands in 2002 and targeting migrants from the South Caucasus. The AVR (27) It is difficult to identify precisely what nationalities of migrants AVR programmes target, but they seem to be country specific and often reflect the movements of the refugee populations. distinguishes three categories of potential`returnees'. First, those who are illegal and did not apply for regularisation or asylum; second, migrants who have applied for asylum, have been rejected, and are not appealing the decision; and third, those whose status is of a temporary nature on the basis that they are awaiting the results of their appeal or have been granted a humanitarian status or a residence permit as a refugee or a victim of trafficking. For each category IOM offers a financial incentive such as a maximum of 135 for a single applicant in the first category, 225 in the second, and 570 in the third. All of these are slightly higher in cases of families with children starting from a maximum of 320 for the first two groups and 800 for the last one. (29) What is of interest here is that this programme targets both`illegal' as well as legal' migrants. It hence aids governments to deport irregular migrants, but it also offers monetary incentives to migrants such as those who have not yet concluded the asylum determination process or those who have been granted a resident permit albeit temporarily to return to their countries of origin. Alongside the offer of monetary incentives, AVR programmes might also offer predeparture, transportation, and postarrival assistanceömeaning that they provide migrants with information, referral, and help with administrative issues regarding their departure from the host country or with a limited reinsertion logistic support in the countries of destination.
AVR's programmes could certainly be viewed as part of the`deportation turn' (Gibney, 2008) indicating a prodigious rise over the last decade in the use of deportationöthe state-authorised removal of noncitizens from state territory öby Western countries as a way of dealing with failed asylum seekers, unlawful migrants, criminals, and suspected terrorists. Yet, whereas deportation is historically regarded and practised as a forceful and sometimes violent transfer of people, IOM's activities in this field point to a new model to which we refer here as neoliberal deportation. From this point of view,`voluntary' does not stand for whether a migrant has been deported willingly or not but rather for the organisational modality of the AVR programmes. AVRs are not about forced removal; instead, they explore and experiment with ways of enlisting the cooperation of migrants in their own expulsion through the provision of forms of information, assistance, and financial inducement. Of course, the history of deportation reveals that AVR is not the first time that migrants have been`encouraged' to vacate a state's territory by positive as well as negative means (Ngai, 2004;Walters, 2002a). Yet the fact that, at least in the Dutch case, one sees a finely graded financial calculus applied to the diverse forms and contexts of unwanted migrancy suggests at the very least that we are witnessing new developments in the economic rationalisation of deportation. This is an economic rationalisation, which seeks to attain its effects by treating the migrant target not as a homogeneous mass but as something to be broken down, perhaps even individualised, so that economic incentives can achieve a more calibrated contact with the particular lives and circumstances in question. As with recent developments in the administration of poverty and crime, the practice of deportation seems to be opening itself to the neoliberal tactic that Valverde and Mopas (2004) describe as``targeted governance''.

Conclusion
We started with the observation of a shift in how scholars approach the question of borders in relation to globalization. If initially this was posed in rather zero-sum terms, more recent work seems to imagine bordering and globalisation as processes that often proceed hand-in-hand. That is, borders are now theorised not merely as remnants of an earlier, supposedly more`territorial' era destined to be swept aside by successive waves of regional and global integration. Instead, they are viewed as being remade, but now under globalising conditions. Hence, research is taking up the task of understanding those kinds of borders that are now specific to a global world öhowever one might want to understand`the global'. This paper has suggested there is a dimension to the contemporary (re)making of borders that deserves much closer attention: the problematisation of borders within concrete schemes, programmes, and tactics of international expertise and intervention. This is what we call the international government of borders. Certainly the fact that a significant literature exists concerning the role of EU agencies, laws, and concepts in the remaking of European borders suggests that the international government of borders has not been ignored. However, it has been addressed largely as a sui generis European phenomenon, and mostly confined to the subfield of European studies. As such, it has not been sufficiently connected to wider intellectual currents and political issues in global politics. In drawing connections between neoliberalism, governmentality, and the international government of borders, and in taking IOM as our case study, we have tried to show that the study of international expertise and its role in the remaking of borders can be fruitfully broadened beyond the realm of European studies.
A second argument developed in the paper is that a Foucauldian analytics of neoliberalism is useful for theorising the international government of borders, at least in the concrete case of the IOM. For it speaks to some of the subtle mechanisms in operation by which targeted states are made into active subjects of bordering projects. The fact that governments seek out the assistance of the IOM in improving thè management' of their borders suggests that these aspects of the international government of borders cannot fully be grasped by a position that sees nothing more than the continuation of the old games of western imperialism. Through projects that often take the mundane form of training seminars, via the promotion of manuals and texts such as handbooks on migration and border management which appear dull and technical, and through the embedding of these devices in networks of aid, regional development, and schemes of regional and national stabilisation, the states of these borderlands are encouraged to take up the work of rebordering themselves, enhancing their control`capacities', and in doing so, enjoined to play a strategic role in the wider rebordering of global society.
However, we do not want to suggest that the international government of borders is in any way reducible to the logic of neoliberalism. As we see it, neoliberalism is a lens which sensitises the researcher to the presence of particular features and specific styles of governing. But it is not the whole story: we do not want to give the impression that everything works by incentivisation, networking, self-regulation, and managerialisation. To go too far in that direction would risk reproducing the irenic and liberal view of politics and world order that underpins so much writing on the theme of global governance'. (30) The fact that the international government of borders constitutes the border as a site amenable to better`management' rather than a question of citizenship is integral to this mode of government. A reformulation of the border in terms of technical norms, standards, and regulations and their implementation through networks and partnerships allows the control of borders to be represented as`beyond politics'. However, despite the depoliticised language of management, politics happens in technocratic spaces. The constitution of borders and of mobility as primarily a problem of (30) For an insightful critique of the liberalism of`global governance' see Dean (2007). management leads to overlooking the ways in which borders continue to produce hierarchies of access to citizenship and conceals the (political) struggles that accompany acts of rebordering. For this reason, future work on the international government of borders would do well to build bridges to other literatures which have given questions of struggle, authority, police, and violence a central place in social analysis (de Genova, 2009;Laffey and Weldes, 2005;Mezzadra and Neilson, 2008;Sheptycki, 2000). A greater emphasis on policing and/or resistance would offset the tendency to see rebordering only as a spatial phenomenon. It would emphasise that whether or not we want to characterise borders as interventions upon a global territory, they are also very real condensations and contestations of policing power.