The Repugnant Other: Soldiers, Missionaries, and Aid Workers as Organizational Migrants

Most people do not consider diplomats, corporate expatriates, missionaries, scholars, or soldiers to be migrants. Even migration scholars often pay little attention to people whose migratory behavior is primarily determined by the interests of the organization they work for. The reason for this blind spot is not the lack of analytical tools. In his landmark 1971 paper on the mobility transition, the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky already acknowledged the importance of such—often highly skilled—migrants. Five years later, Charles Tilly made a similar point in his migration typology, which was adopted in the overview of migration in Western Europe by Leslie Page Moch, by explicitly distinguishing “career migrants.” Notwithstanding the inclusion of what we label “organizational migrants” by leading scholars, in the mainstream migration historiography attention to their mobility is conspicuously lacking.