Governing Through the Language of Vulnerability: IOM’s Role in EU Border Externalization

This paper investigates the extent to which the discourses of vulnerability developed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have been employed in migration management practices as part of the European Union (EU) border externalization agenda. The project brings together a close engagement with the literature on vulnerability in migration contexts, theories of humanitarian governance, and critiques of border externalization, to argue that the increasing use of the language of vulnerability in the field of forced migration has generated a hierarchy in classifications of displaced people with those most vulnerable deemed worthy of international protections or assistance and those constructed as less-than vulnerable or invulnerable excluded from any form of relief. Through a close reading of IOM’s migrant vulnerability framework, the paper contends that vulnerability becomes a key term through which the organization elaborates its own humanitarian governance regime focused on identifying, tracking, classifying, and controlling people on the move. The complex institutional practices, frameworks, and assessments regarding vulnerability developed by the IOM have been coopted by what I refer to as the EU governmentality of migration. Throughout IOM’s participation in EU border externalization strategies, including returns, securitized borderwork, and containment, vulnerability is employed as a key migration governance mechanism.