‘Beneficiary-ownership’? Redemptive knowledge and policy-making on migration in West Africa
West Africa sees major activity in the development of migration policies, promoted by international organisations, funded by governments mainly of Europe. Policy development is couched in terms of ‘beneficiary-ownership’, stressing the participation of West African governments. This is problematised as playing down the influence of European and international organizations. We argue that policy-making on migration in West Africa is better understood through the lens of ‘subjectional diplomacy’, a one-sided yet complex relationship between national and international actors that consolidates particular discourses of the ‘problem’ of migration. We find interview and documentary evidence from NGOs and governmental actors across Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea as well as ECOWAS Headquarters and international governmental organizations in Abuja that the logic of beneficiary-ownership is not symmetric. We show how the IOM holds ‘redemptive’ knowledge that turns the civilizing mission of old into a professionalising mission embedding neo-colonial relations.
Funding
DFID (now FCDO)
Department for International Development (Contract 8322)
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- International Relations, Politics and History
Published in
GeopoliticsPublisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativesLicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.Acceptance date
2024-03-25Publication date
2024-04-24Copyright date
2024ISSN
1465-0045eISSN
1557-3028Publisher version
Language
- en