'We must do it gently.' The contested implementation of the IOM's migration management in Morocco

The expanding character of European migration policies has widely been studied in terms of either the 'externalization', 'exterritorialization' and 'external governance' of migration control or the 'empowerment' of third countries using migration issues in international negotiations. The ways in which the emerging transnational policies of migration management are actually put into practice and are thereby shaped by implementing actors, as well as the contexts to which they have been applied, have received less attention. Against this background, the article turns to the IOM's contested implementation of migration management in Morocco. As such, it aims to extend the dominant focus of most studies on state and EU institutions, their policy, discourse and decision making towards the border zones in which their practical outcome and meaning is negotiated. Using the example of two projects implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), it reconstructs the negotiation processes of international migration management on the ground. Based on the analysis of emerging control practices in Morocco, the article shows how humanitarian and neoliberal logics of governing migration complement existing security-oriented policies and, as such, contribute to the (re) stabilization and expansion of the trans-Mediterranean migration regime in times of fading legitimacy. With theoretical reference to the concept of a migration regime, the article argues that these reconfigurations are neither the result of a centrally directed 'EUropean masterplan' nor of a linear evolution towards more sophisticated control technologies but the contingent outcome of struggles between migration movements and the political and administrative attempts to control them.