In the past two decades, scientists, think tanks, international organizations and NGOs have highlighted how climate change may lead people to migrate internally and across international borders. The International Organization for Migration has sought a role in understanding and responding to the issue of climate related migration. IOM staff began a series of workshops, conferences, research and reports on climate and migration, when most member states were reluctant to discuss, let alone finance projects, on the topic under the auspices of IOM. However, over time IOM staff successfully shifted member states’ understanding of the organization’s role to include work on climate change and migration. IOM staff worked with a few sympathetic states and other stakeholders (such as universities, NGOs and private funders) to initiate climate change projects, and over time convinced the IOM Council that climate change migration was a strategic priority for the organization. IOM reshaped its obligations to states, despite its projectized and heavily earmarked funding structure.

Despite having no such explicit mandate, IOM is one of the largest global actors in IDP response and protection. Yet, its activities on behalf of IDPs have been remarkably under-studied. This chapter appraises IOM’s obligations under the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (GPs), and assesses the extent to which IOM applies these in its work. The chapter does so in two main ways. First, by mapping references to IDPs and the GPs in IOM’s policies, and, second, by examining how these policies are implemented in practice in two country contexts – Haiti (disaster displacement) and Iraq (conflict-induced displacement). While important to recognise the positive impacts of IOMs IDP protection efforts, this chapter identifies and interrogates, with some concern, substantial inconsistencies between IOMs activities and the ethos of the GPs. In particular, the chapter is critical of IOMs almost exclusive camp-based focus and its predominant preference for return as a durable solution. Also troubling is an observed decline in IOM references to the GPs as the leading international standards for IDP protection. The chapter finds that IOM adherence with the GPs cannot thus be taken as a given - indeed, adherence to date is likely more by chance than by design.

This chapter investigates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) dramatically expanded its involvement in humanitarian emergencies over the past three decades. Building on insights from historical institutionalism in international relations, we hypothesize that crises which touch upon matters of migration may constitute opportunities for IOM to expand the range of its activities as contingencies call for flexible responses that the organization is (the only one) apt to deliver. The 1990-91 Gulf War served as a ‘critical juncture’ in this regard, where IOM started to expand more forcefully into the broad realm of humanitarian assistance. It set a precedent that served as best-practice example and led to an ex post formalization of the institutional expansion through corresponding frameworks for action. As we show in case studies of the 2011 Libyan civil war and the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, this pattern holds across a variety of crisis contexts: humanitarian emergencies expose gaps in the governance architecture that IOM is quick to fill, thereby increasing the range of its activities which is later normalized in institutional rules and practice. Today’s vast array of humanitarian and other crisis-related tasks fulfilled by IOM attest to the lasting ‘power of precedent’.

While a growing body of research explores the ways in which NGOs affect IO accountability, relatively little high-level, sustained international advocacy has focused on the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and IOM has been under-examined in the literature on NGOs and IO accountability. This is surprising as IOM has a history of involvement in activities such as migrant returns and detention that may threaten or actively violate migrants’ rights—activities that call out for careful external scrutiny. This chapter explores the drivers and implications of this puzzling disconnect, and opportunities to overcome it. We map out the limited ways in which international human rights advocacy organizations have engaged with IOM, and consider why advocacy NGOs have not more actively pushed for increased accountability from IOM. International advocacy NGOs have important but still under-developed roles to play in advancing accountability for the human rights implications of IOM’s work. Enhancing accountability is a two-way street: there is a need for advocates to devote more attention to IOM, and develop more concerted advocacy strategies vis-à-vis IOM. Meanwhile, IOM should clearly recognize the importance of external advocacy, and engage more openly and systematically with human rights advocates, moving beyond traditional postures of defensiveness, dismissal and secrecy.

This chapter analyses IOM’s practices and policies on immigration detention from the 1990s to date, spanning a period of significant change in its approaches to detention. The chapter first distills pertinent international human rights law (IHRL) on migration-related detention, and then examines IOM’s normative statements concerning detention. It shows that while IOM generally emphasises international legal standards, it also tends to stress states’ ‘prerogative’ to detain, frame alternatives to detention (ATDs) as a desirable option rather than a legal obligation, and weave an operational role for itself, notably through assisted voluntary returns (AVRs). The chapter then interrogates IOM’s involvement in detention through four case studies. These reveal not only IOM’s changing role regarding detention, but its enduring part in a global system whereby powerful states and regions seek to contain protection seekers ‘elsewhere.’ The chapter concludes that, without constitutional and institutional change to ensure it meets its positive human rights obligations, and deeper critical reflection on its humanitarian duties, IOM’s practice risks expanding and legitimating detention.

This chapter provides an introduction to the evolution of IOM’s mandate and obligations from its founding in 1951 to 2022. In contrast to the tendency in some scholarly literature to portray IOM as a static actor devoid of normative obligations and available to unquestioningly advance state interests, however nefarious, this chapter paints a more complex picture. Focusing in particular on IOM as a “multi-mandated” organization, the chapter charts how IOM’s mandate and conceptions of its obligations have shifted over time, including in light of the development over the past two decades of a significant set of internal policies, frameworks and guidelines. Without minimizing the significant gaps and opacity that remain, the chapter explores changes in the organization’s perceived purpose and obligations, and explanations for these shifts, drawing on insights from international relations scholarship on international organizations’ legitimation efforts. Gradually, IOM has transformed from a logistics agency strapped to the interests of the United States, to a global organization with a still nascent but growing sense of its obligations not only to states but also to people on the move—changes that have ultimately advanced IOM’s efforts to secure its own position and power in the international system.

Collecting and processing large volumes of both personal and non-personal data on migrants and displaced populations is an integral part of IOM’s work. Through the ongoing expansion of its primary data collection mechanism, the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), the organization has come to be the most widely-used and authoritative source of data on internal displacement in particular. This chapter outlines how IOM has positioned itself in an increasingly competitive market of migration and displacement data and discusses the normative obligations that come with this. An analysis of the use of DTM in Haiti and along migratory routes in West and Central Africa illustrates that apart from its key role in the humanitarian planning cycle, one important political function of the DTM has been to showcase the success of donors’ policy interventions. This goes hand in hand with a number of risks and pathologies like the statistical “erasure” of populations with enduring needs and the crowding out of more development-oriented data collectors that raise questions with regard to IOM’s adherence to the principle of data responsibility. Against this background, the chapter calls for a change in institutional set-up and funding structure to ensure that IOM engages in responsible data collection only.

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the contribution advanced in this volume. First, it provides a brief overview of IOM’s history and structure. Second, it offers a primer on IOM’s entry into the UN system as a related organization in 2016. Third, it situates the book in relation to the core concepts underpinning it, including the obligations, accountability, and expansion dynamics of international organizations (IOs). Fourth, it draws out key themes running through the volume, particularly in relation to grounding assessments of IOM in international law; understanding IOM’s roles as a norm ‘breaker, taker and shaper’; analysing IOM as a protection actor; and developing more complex accounts of institutional change at IOM. Fifth, it maps out the structure, scope and limitations of book. Finally, it reflects on the legal and political implications of this volume, focusing on the need to recast the IOM Constitution to centre not only the organization’s obligations to its member states but also to the migrants it claims to serve.