This year marks the end of an era at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). After two consecutive terms, ICMPD Director General Michael Spindelegger will retire from the organization at the end of 2025. Since 2016, the former Vice-Chancellor of Austria has contributed significantly to expanding the ICMPD’s footprint in European migration policy, both in terms of mainstreaming the key concepts it advocates for, as well as accelerating its on-the-ground impact and presence across Europe, Africa, and Asia. The ICMPD has played an important role not only in integrating non-EU states on the Balkan route into the European border regime, but also states in the Mediterranean such as Tunisia, Morocco and Lebanon, and states along the so-called “New Silk Road” stretching from Eastern Europe via Central Asia to Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
Fabian Georgi is a political scientist at the University of Kassel and co-editor of movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies.
Sofian Philip Naceur is a Tunis-based freelance journalist working with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s North Africa Office.
Austria’s former Minister of Integration Susanne Raab, Spindelegger’s successor at the organization’s helm, is to officially take over as the border regime service provider’s new director in January 2026. If she is to maintain the operational and political orientation of the ICMPD’s last decade, the transition from a nearly seamless and mostly peripheral service provider to an influential actor in the European border regime industry will certainly continue.
Given the expected further growth of the ICMPD’s impact on European, African, or Asian border regimes, it is even more important to better comprehend what the organization stands for, to which extent it has sustained the spirit of its early years, but also in which geopolitical and economic context it was established. Fabian Georgi’s in-depth research on the ICMPD and the empirical data he was able to collect in the early 2000s in particular offer a unique insight into the organization’s ideological foundation, the motivations of the Austrian and Swiss governments in establishing it in the first place, and, crucially, its conception of migration as a “phenomenon” to be “managed”, filtered, and harnessed, “but always for the benefit of European states”.
Georgi’s study on the ICMPD, published in 2004 and 2007, contains data that is partly non-accessible today, revealing interview extracts as well as an early analysis of the centre’s overall self-perception and the reasoning behind its campaigning for what is largely known today as “border management”. As this academic resource was only available in German until now, this brochure finally makes key empirical findings published more than 20 years ago accessible to an English-speaking readership for the first time. This publication provides for an edited and shortened version of the original text to facilitate access to this valuable data for a larger audience, reconstruct the context in which the ICMPD was established in the early 1990s and trace its development over its first decade.
To gain a deeper understanding of the activities, role, and importance of the ICMPD today, it is crucial to look at how the organization emerged and developed in its early years. The political and institutional decisions and developments during this formative phase (1993–2004) continue to shape the ICMPD’s work and relevance today. One of the distinguishing features of this study is that it draws on written sources that are no longer publicly accessible, including annual and financial reports as well as project descriptions and official self-representations published by the ICMPD on its website at the time. It was also based on seven semi-structured interviews with ICMPD employees, including the organization’s founding director, Swedish-born Jonas Widgren, and his then deputy and successor, Gottfried Zürcher. These interviews offer rare insight into the ICMPD’s institutional context as well as its self-perception — something that would be very difficult to reconstruct today.
Given that the ICMPD was set up 32 years ago and, over the last ten years, has expanded significantly — both in terms of its contracted project volume and its geographical outreach – there is still surprisingly little literature on the organization. This is all the more surprising given that not only the ICMPD, but also the field of migration and border studies has grown exponentially in the last decade. Against this backdrop, this publication now aims at proving historical data on the ICMPD to encourage further research on the organization.