Colonial continuities and colonial unknowing in international migration management: the International Organization for Migration reconsidered
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) exerts increasing power in global migration governance, yet research on IOM’s early history is scarce. Explanations of IOM’s founding and early migration management efforts are often reduced to bipolar, Cold War politics, with the US creating the organisation outside the UN to sidestep Soviet interference. Such simplistic accounts fail to grapple with the ways in which its creation and early activities also reflected and entrenched legacies of colonialism and related racialized inequalities. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article analyses how colonial interests and biases also shaped IOM’s establishment, founding documents, and vacillating positions in decolonisation movements. It examines the organisation’s role in moving colonists out of newly independent states; facilitating settler colonial states’ preference for white migrants; and advancing western interests in having an international migration forum in which opposition to exclusionary policies was virtually non-existent. In particular, it questions the agency’s involvement in supporting white migration to Southern Africa in the apartheid era, and the sanitisation of such work from IOM’s institutional history. Theoretically, the article analyses these dynamics through the lens of ‘colonial unknowing’, thereby laying the foundation for deeper, historicised understandings of IOM’s continued, contested roles in migration management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it