International Organizations as Global Migration Governors: The World Bank in Central Asia

Numerous international organizations play a key role in generating and sustaining migration governance across the world in the absence of a global migration regime. However, global governance scholarship lacks grounded understanding of their role, which is often rejected or simply left unnoticed. In rare cases when international organizations do get academic attention,light is shed on two referent “migration”international organizations the International Organization for Migration and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees while other IOs remain in their shadow. Drawing on the case of the post-Soviet Central Asia, which is characterized by both significant migration dynamics and multilayered governance but has so far escaped attention of migration governance scholars, this article takes two steps for establishing a new research agenda. First, it deploys and applies to international organizations the concept of global migration governors defined as authorities who exercise power across borders for the purpose of affecting migration policy. Second, it moves discussion beyond the referent international organizations and demonstrates the role of often overlooked nonreferent international organizations, such as the World Bank, active in the field of migration governance. This analysis is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia conducted in 2011−2015.