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Since the 2000s, migration and asylum seem to have pervaded diplomatic discourses and actions. In 2023, in its foreign policy statement, the European Union emphasised the "growing relevance of migration" and the "militarisation of borders and instrumentalisation of migration", as well as the "increased complexity of migration governance". But migration diplomacy is often mistaken for a response of states to the globalisation of mobility or the pursuit of strategic interests while in fact, it offers paths to question the foundations of statehood, violence and the international order. On the one hand, it is defined as the use of migration for non-migratory diplomatic purposes. States and their representatives, as well as non-state actors (migrant networks, non-governmental and humanitarian organisations, businesses, transnational mafias) use migrants and refugees, immigration, emigration or diasporas to strengthen or destabilise a country or political actors, and to obtain material, economic or symbolic advantages from diplomatic partners. On the other hand, migration diplomacy refers to the use of diplomatic instruments to control different types of mobility (immigration, emigration, asylum, exile) from a distance. The levers of bilateral, multilateral and sectoral diplomacy, such as development aid or trade policy, military or cultural policy, and public or private diplomacy are thus used to regulate the geography and volume of migratory flows in the short or long term.

Controlling migration and migrants can therefore be either a means or an end of diplomacy. More often than not, migration is both a means and an end and is deployed at different levels using different formal and informal instruments. Migration diplomacy therefore offers a critical framework for rethinking the tensions between control and sovereignty, cooperation and conflict, domination and resistance, and the link between domestic and foreign policy.

Genealogies of migration diplomacy: Diasporic state building and free circulation

The term "migration diplomacy" seems to have only appeared in the early 2000s in connection with restrictive immigration control policies in Europe and North America, the "wall around the West" (Andreas & Snyder, 2000). In these contexts, the expression is generally used incidentally, in brackets or inverted commas. However, the first definitions found come from elsewhere: they are rooted on the diplomatic history of African and Middle Eastern countries, where migration is perceived not only as a threat, but also and above all as a symbolic, strategic and economic resource. The notion was later framed in a global perspective (Adamson & Tsourapas, 2019) but early studies invite to decentre an overly western gaze on migration diplomacy.

A definition emerged in 2007 to describe the history of negotiations between the Eritrean guerrilla parties and neighbouring Arab countries concerning the reception of Eritrean refugees (Thiollet, 2007). Securing asylum or immigration for Eritreans was both a goal for Eritrean guerilla parties and an instrument in support of the war against Ethiopia. Arab neighbours were asked for political and financial support. Eritrean refugee diasporas acted as a channel of influence in the Arab world, and as a rear base providing financial support for the struggle. The Eritrean case, similar to other cases like Kurdish, Tamul, or Palestinian transnational activism, demonstrates the entanglement of protection and diplomatic leveraging emigration, exile and diasporas. Both of which are central to the process of forming a new independent state.

The same pattern of diplomacy involving refugee diasporas in support of a state or the creation of a state can be found in the Kurdish, Palestinian and Armenian cases and in the widely studied case of the Jewish diaspora. The analytical framework of Eritrean 'migration diplomacy' is used for more general analyses (Wihtol de Wenden, 2009). It forms part of the numerous works on the public diplomacy of sending countries towards their diasporas, known as 'diaspora diplomacy' or 'attention policies' in French-language research. India, Croatia (Ragazzi, 2010), Turkey and the Philippines directly and indirectly govern their citizens - migrants and refugees alike - beyond their borders, in particular to secure the financial transfers that are essential to their economies.

Of course, migration diplomacy also concerns destination countries, both in Western and non-Western contexts. It describes for instance the diplomacy of the Gulf monarchies, major countries of labour immigration but also of informal asylum, that an extension of the initial definition is proposed (Thiollet, 2011). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Gulf countries welcomed migrants and refugees from neighbouring Arab countries, not only to meet the needs of a labour-intensive market, but also to strengthen regional integration within the Arab world. Migration is therefore both an end and a means of Gulf states’ diplomacy. However, the monarchies operate informally, with no explicit agreements or negotiations until the late 1990s. Migration policies were selective and discretionary. The monarchies, which are not signatories to the 1951 Convention, have adopted quasi-asylum policies for Palestinian exiles since the 1950s, for Eritreans in the 1960s and 1970s, for Syrian exiles in 2011, and for Sudanese in 2022 (Lysa, 2023).

In post-colonial Africa, states used migration and asylum similarly to promote regional integration, but the institutionalised the diplomacy of asylum and circulation through the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa and the 2018 Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community on the Free Movement of Persons, the Right of Residence and the Right of Establishment. Similar diplomatic efforts in favour of free movement can be observed in Asia and Latin America (Novick et al., 2010), and in Europe with the creation of the Schengen area, although they are hardly ever analysed as part of the development of migration diplomacy.

While often associated with contemporary Western........

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